The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP) released its annual State of Hispanic Homeownership Report, revealing that Hispanic households added a net gain of 441,000 owner-households in 2025, the largest single-year increase since the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting the data in 1975.
Without those gains, the total number of U.S. homeowners would have declined by 125,000 households last year.
Findings, discussed during a recent panel moderated by CNBC’s Diania Olick, come amid what NAHREP co-founder and CEO Gary Acosta characterized as far from ideal circumstances.
“I wasn’t expecting Latinos to have the net gain that they had, first of all, especially considering the environment — probably the toughest affordability crisis that we’ve experienced, at least in a generation that I can think of — and a difficult environment politically and economically, as well,” he said during the panel.
Jaimie Smeraski, NAHREP’s vice president of national programs and research, highlighted the impact of heightened immigration enforcement on Hispanic buyers and sellers.
“Almost every single person that we interviewed really wanted to point to that, in some capacity, it impacted their clients, even if their clients were not undocumented,” she said. “It really kind of transcended different immigration statuses and created a lot of hesitancy — both on the demand side, and then it impacts the supply side.”
Young buyers, supply shortages
Hispanic buyers are also younger than their non-Hispanic counterparts, a demographic advantage that positions them to drive housing demand for years to come, the report shows.
Smeraski noted that 8% of Hispanic home purchase originations went to borrowers under age 25, compared with 6% for non-Hispanic borrowers.
The Hispanic population overall has a median age of 31 — roughly 10 years younger than the general population and 14 years younger than non-Hispanic whites.
While market conditions have shifted in buyers’ favor in some regions, the underlying supply crisis remains unresolved.
New home sales plunged in January, and the supply of new homes for sale jumped to nearly 10 months — a level that typically signals a buyer’s market. But much of that inventory is priced beyond the reach of first-time buyers, panelists said.
Kara Murray-Badal, housing venture lab director at Terner Labs, said solutions vary by region.
“The Bay Area, the Northeast — these are markets with extremely constrained supply,” she said. “They’re already extremely dense. There are also problems with zoning. It’s really hard to build in those markets. Then, you have these contagion markets that are kind of absorbing the people from those places. You’ve got the Phoenixes, the Nevadas, even the Miamis that can that have the space and the capacity.”
Acosta said that even as new construction has generally focused on more advanced housing tiers, it still registers as a net positive.
“I’m still of the mindset that any housing is good,” he said. “Even if we’re building a lot of maybe mid- to luxury-type homes, you’re going to see people tend to move up and purchase those properties, which generally leaves more affordable properties for sale that they need to sell to move up.”
Policy levers, regulatory costs
The panel also discussed federal policy responses to the housing shortages such as the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act.
“If we’re dealing with a 4 to 8 million supply crisis, then having housing be easier to build is essential to creating, to filling that gap,” Murray-Badal said. “The U.S. government, the national government, has a real role to play in making that easier.”
According to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), regulatory costs add roughly $94,000 to the price of every new home — a figure that Acosta says has a “huge impact on affordability.”
He also called for reforms on the mortgage side.
“I think a lot of the underwriting criteria that’s being deployed today is very archaic, especially when it comes to self-employed borrowers,” Acosta said. “Latinos are almost twice as likely as the general population to own a small business, so that disproportionately affects our community.”
Market volatility and seller behavior
Realtor.com Senior Economist Daniele Hale said 2026 will be a critical test for housing market recovery.
“The good news is that sellers are coming to the market with, I think, more realistic expectations in 2026 than they had in 2025,” she said. “We saw a lot of delistings in 2025 because sellers didn’t have to sell. They were looking at record high levels of equity in their house. They weren’t facing any real economic stress. So, they would list their home, and if they got their price, sure they would sell it. If they didn’t, many of them chose to pull their listings off the market.
“I don’t know if we’ll see that same degree of ambivalence about the outcome from sellers in 2026 because we’re already seeing listing prices that are down a little bit compared to last year, and so that does suggest, to me a little bit more acceptance with where the market is in 2026.”
The “lock-in effect” — homeowners’ reluctance to sell and give up low mortgage rates — is also beginning to ease, though slowly, Hale added.
“For the first time in a while, we now see that the share of households that have a 6% or higher mortgage [rates] exceeds the share that have a 3% or lower mortgage [rates],” she said. “This is one of those things that time is going to very slowly, gradually heal.”
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