The U.S. Hispanic community increased the number of homes its members owned in 2014, although the increased slowed down with respect to earlier years, according to the State of Hispanic Homeownership Report published on Monday.
“Hispanics achieved modest gains in net new owner households this past year. However, the number of net homeownership gains for Hispanics has slowed over the past three years from an increase of 347,000 in 2012 to a notably smaller increase of 54,000 in 2014,” says the report, a publication of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, or NAHREP.
Over the past year, the rate of homeownership among Hispanics fell from 46.1 percent, where it stood in 2013, to 45.4 percent in 2014, a reduction that the study attributes to the overall growth in the number of Hispanic households.
Thus, the net creation of Hispanic households increased at a faster rate than the number of homes owned by Latinos.
“From 1994 to 2005 the national homeownership rate increased by five percentage points but Hispanics gained nearly seven percentage points over that same period of time,” the report says.
From 2000 to 2014, Hispanics accounted for 50 percent of the “net growth of overall owner households” in the country and a 2014 study by the Urban Institute forecast that Latinos will account for 55.5 percent of new homeowners between 2010 and 2020.
“The report also suggests that even higher Hispanic homeownership growth could be achieved under a stronger economy and policies that expand credit to lower- and middle-income Hispanics,” the report adds.
The document also says that the demographic calculations indicate that the U.S. Hispanic population will reach almost 120 million by 2050, more than double the group’s current numbers and a 592 percent growth since 1970, compared to a 56 percent overall growth in the U.S. population as a whole over the same period.
Those figures have a direct impact on the growth of household formation, one of the most important predictors for potential gains in homeownership.
In 2014, the number of Hispanic homes grew by 320,000, representing 40 percent of the total household growth in the United States.
That figure is the largest household growth percentage for any of the country’s population groups, meaning that seven million of the 17 million new homes that will be created between 2010 and 2025 will be Hispanic. EFE
