Industry Works to Translate the Complexities of Home Buying

Balloon payments, trust deeds, principals, amortization: They’re complex terms, but home buyers need to understand them.

Purchasing real estate is a momentous task for just about everyone, but the process can seem almost impossible for those with limited or no English abilities.

“To put it mildly, buying a home when you don’t speak the language is a major problem,” said Pat Patterson, president of the Ventura County Coastal Assn. of Realtors. “It’s already a pretty complicated process, so you can imagine how much harder it becomes when you don’t speak the language well.”

However, as more and more non-English speakers enter the housing market, Realtors and real estate firms are working to bridge the language gap.

Those steps include:

* More real estate agents speak two or more languages, and large firms might have brokers speaking languages ranging from Arabic to Swahili.

* There is an effort underway to form a council of area agents and Realtors to discuss the problems and challenges of home buying when one or both of the principals are non-English speakers.

Patterson, who is leading that effort, said he would like to put together a list of guidelines and suggestions for agents and mortgage brokers on ways to smooth the process and cut the work needed to complete a transaction.

* An Internet Web site, www.sucasa.com, features Spanish-language guides to home buying, complete with translated purchase agreements and simple explanations of the purchasing process.

* Countrywide Credit of Calabasas recently launched a national program called “Hispanic Initiative” to court Latino home buyers by hiring more Spanish-speaking personnel.

“That’s certainly needed in Southern California and the county,” said Kathy Mehringer, a vice president at Fred Sands Brown Realty in Westlake Village. “It will make the whole process easier for us and our clients.”

Few places in the nation have the kind of ethnic diversity and growth of non-English and bilingual speakers that Southern California has.

A recent UCLA study found that one of every five home buyers in Southern California is foreign-born, and that number is expected to rise as more immigrants settle in the United States and enter the prime home-buying age.

Between 1980 and 1995, immigrants made up 23% of the increase in California home buyers, according to a report issued by the Fannie Mae Foundation. That number, the report said, is expected to grow to 46% during the next decade, translating into about 764,000 new immigrant homeowners.

“It’s a trend that we can’t ignore, and that’s why people like myself are starting to think of ways we can make buying a home easier,” Patterson said.

Although real estate firms are eager to tap this market, agents said the process is often very long and complicated, requiring them to spend a great amount of time with clients.

Because buying a home is a daunting process, packed with financial and legal jargon, prospective buyers are often fearful when it comes time to actually commit to purchasing a home.

“Usually, they have no concept of what’s involved in buying a home,” said Ira Nugoho, a Realtor at Fred Sands Brown Realty in Westlake Village who works with Indonesian clients. “They need a lot of attention. . . . They need to be walked through the entire process.”

Nugoho, who has been a broker for 12 years, said that 80% to 90% of her annual transactions deal with principals with limited or no English abilities.

The relationship with those clients, she said, can become more involved because a high level of trust is often required before any kind of transaction takes place.

“That takes time, a lot of time,” she said. “Sometimes I get calls in the middle of the night with questions . . . that might seem simple to most of us. . . . But you have to expect that.”

Roberto Cardenas, who has worked for Patterson & Tintorri since 1985, said he has several Spanish-speaking clients.

“They depend on people who speak Spanish,” Cardenas said. “They trust me as an agent, partly because I speak Spanish and partly because of my knowledge of the business.”

Cecilia Cruz, also at Patterson & Tintorri, said that being able to speak a client’s language puts everyone at ease and plays a large role in closing the deal.

“It’s important,” she said. “Buying a house is about the biggest thing a person can do in their life, so being able to speak the language helps make them feel comfortable.”

As the number of non- and limited-English speakers increases in Ventura County and the rest of Southern California, the demands on the industry to accommodate them are going to be greater, industry executives said.

Just having bilingual brokers will not be enough. The industry must become more attentive to the needs of foreign clients, Realtors said.

“It’s pretty clear to just about all of us that this is something that we’re going to need to work at,” Patterson said. “But it’s something that I think we, as an industry can do. . . . We just need to do this together in a way that we’re all going to understand.”

Times Community News reporter Anna Gorman contributed to this story.

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