‘Like paradise’: Why more Latinos than ever own homes in North Carolina

Three years ago, Carlos Bajana was still living in New Jersey, with several voices in his ear telling him in Spanish to move down south.

“I used to come down here to visit some friends from Ecuador,” Bajana, 50, told The News & Observer in Spanish. “Every time we visited, we liked the quality of life more. The people are nicer here.”

Smiling toward his three-bedroom home in the rural city of Henderson on a warm afternoon, Bajana said he’s happy to be part of a newer wave of Latino residents in the greater Triangle area.

“This is like paradise,” he said. “This is the kind of life I was wishing for when I was living back up north.”

Bajana moved to Henderson about two years ago from North Bergen, a New Jersey township with one of the highest population densities in the U.S. and a Hispanic-majority population.

He’s since traded life in a cramped apartment with loud traffic and high density for comfy, small-town living on 1.5 acres in spacious Vance County, about one hour north of Raleigh.

“It’s a 360-degree change,” Andrea Bajana, his wife, said.

At their new home, their 4-year-old daughter Cassandra can play safely in the yard with her cousins and the Bajanas can have family barbecues in the backyard.

The rate of Latino homeowners has steadily risen in North Carolina, with homeownership rates increasing in 95 of the state’s 100 counties over the past decade, Census data shows.

That’s because Latinos, either born in the U.S. or migrating from across the Americas and the Caribbean, are the fastest-growing population in the state.

The Hispanic population grew by 40% from about 800,000 to 1.12 million in 2020 from a decade before, and is projected to grow to 1.4 million by 2023, according to state demographers.

North Carolina has had a net migration of about 54,000 Latino residents from 2018 to 2022, according to a Freddie Mac calculation of Census data.

For Bajana, who migrated from Ecuador to New Jersey as a teenager, homeownership is part of the coveted American Dream.

“My mother moved here in the 70s,” Bajana said. “When she got her papers, she brought us over here with her residency.”

Bajana’s family first lived in an apartment in the U.S. but moved into their first house through the earnings of his mother, who worked long hours cleaning houses.

“I was shown by example that it was possible to obtain the American Dream working honestly and saving money,” he said.

A change in demographics of Latino homebuyers

A cultural motivation to buy a home in the U.S. is generational. It once led Otto Cedeno to buy his first home in the U.S.

Cedeno founded Movil Realty, a Triangle-based real estate agency that primarily serves Hispanic clients, many of them first-time homebuyers.

The demographics of Latino homebuyers in the Triangle area have changed, he said.

“It’s no longer just the typical Latino who worked in construction and then bought a house,” Cedeno said in Spanish. “They’re people who are moving from elsewhere and they have money for a home… they have more buying power when coming from bigger cities.”

Latino homebuyers nationally trend younger: nearly three-quarters of Latinos who purchased a home in 2021 were under the age of 45.

That’s compared to two-thirds of the general population and more than half of non-Hispanic White buyers, according to the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP).

One key factor behind this growth is cultural and ethnic in nature – Latino real estate agents in the U.S. predominantly serve Latino clients and more than a third of agents conduct at least half of their transactions entirely in Spanish, according to a 2023 survey by NAHREP.

Cedeno, who is also Ecuadorian-American, said word of mouth is a big part of it.

Ecuadorian families progressively began to move to the Triangle from New York and New Jersey after Cedeno sold a few families their first homes here about a decade ago.

“That group brought several other families… around 200 people from that community alone moved here in a period of about eight years,” he said.

Bajana, who bought his home in Henderson with the help of Cedeno, has his eyes set on investment and flipping houses.

He spent a year fixing up his home, has put it on the market through Cedeno, and plans to buy another.

“We’re people who know how to work with our hands,” Cedeno said. “If you throw a barbecue with some Coronas, you’ll get 20 people who will volunteer to help you work on your home. It’s a marvel of our community, we help each other.”

What’s the housing market like for Latinos in NC?

North Carolina saw a high year-over-year home price appreciation of 13.1% in North Carolina in 2022. So first-time homebuyers are getting priced out of the Triangle, The News & Observer reported previously.

But homeownership has grown among Latinos through areas adjacent to the Triangle’s main counties in rural areas, where homes are more affordable.

Moreover, Ceden argues that Latino residents migrating from out of state are the main drivers behind real estate and economic growth in rural areas adjacent to the Triangle.

“The (Latino) community is driving economic growth in rural areas that typically don’t grow,” Cedeno said. “Some were already homeowners (in other states), but here they can buy a newer home.”

Many people are calling agents like Oscar Corrales, who works at CASA123, a Raleigh-based real estate firm whose clients are virtually all Hispanic, with eager plans.

Some are longtime residents and former construction workers who became skilled subcontractors and work on lucrative job sites, boosting their buying power, he said.

Corrales, who is the president of the Raleigh-Durham chapter of NAHREP, said many of the Latino homebuyers in North Carolina are younger and often second- or third-generation Americans.

English may be their primary language, and they often have a college education and good credit scores.

As the housing market has roared, CASA123 has increasingly focused on exterior counties of the Triangle to sell homes. Those areas include Alamance, Lee, Person, Harnett, Wilson and Nash Counties.

“We’ve expanded a bit to allow Latinos to have more access to homes and not lose their opportunity,” Corrales said.

Many Latin American expats often tell Corrales how they never planned to buy a home in the U.S., but then decided to plant roots here since their children grew up American.

“First-generation Latino immigrants often had a thought of ‘I’m going to return to my country,’” Corrales said. “But that first generation had children here, and the second generation grew... they felt more American, and wanted to stay.”

Other buyers are business people with white-collar backgrounds anywhere from Central to South America who are looking to diversify their real estate portfolios or settle down in a place with a lower cost of living.

“They’re saying, ‘I’m at a point in my life where I don’t want Miami, I don’t want New York City, I don’t want Los Angeles,” Corrales said. “’and I heard that North Carolina was a good place.’”

Latino homeownership in NC by the numbers

People of Latin American descent are buying homes more than ever in North Carolina. Census data suggests noteworthy upward trends for Latino real estate in North Carolina:

• Latino or Hispanic homeownership rate increased by 4.4 percentage points from 2010 to 2020, with 47% of Latino households occupied by owners.

• The majority of Latinos are renters, but the rate of renter households dropped from 57% to 53% in 2020.

• White homeownership didn’t grow and instead decreased by one percentage point to 73%. White renter housing units increased by one point to 27%.

• The portion of Latino homeowner households was greater than the portion of Black homeowner households in proportion to their population. Black homeownership rose by just one percentage point to 46.2% in 2020. The rate of Black renter households increased from 47.5% to 53.8%.

• Overall, the homeownership rate of non-Latino households in the state decreased by two points, and non-Latino renter households increased by two points.

The biggest gains were in the smaller or rural counties: Wake increased only 1.3 points but Johnston County increased by 11 points; Perquimans increased by 22 points; Mecklenburg decreased by 1 point; Durham, 6.5 points; Orange, 6 points.