Hispanics Move Up List of American Home Buyers

Home buyers with names such as Rodriguez, Garcia and Hernandez bumped Brown, Miller and Davis down the list of most common buyers' names in 2005, reflecting Hispanics' rapid advance into the middle class.

A DataQuick Information Systems analysis of deeds and county assessment data shows a dramatic rise in the number of Hispanic and Asian home buyers since 2000.

Smith and Johnson remain the two most popular, but Rodriguez has replaced Brown in third place. Four Hispanic names are in the top 10, compared with two in 2000. advertisement

Hispanic surnames made up 14.6 percent of all home buyers' names, up from 10.3 percent five years earlier.

"The Latino population is really integrating into the middle class - and rapidly," said John Karevoll, analyst at DataQuick, a San Diego real estate information company that scoured public records in 38 states that accounted for 93 percent of the nation's real estate activity.

Asians also are bigger players. Nguyen, a common Vietnamese name, moved from 23rd to 14th.

In California, almost 28 percent of home buyers are Hispanic and the five most common surnames are Hispanic. Only one was in the top five in 2000.

The changes are dramatic elsewhere, too. No Hispanic names appeared in the top five in Illinois in 2000. Now, Garcia is third and Rodriguez fifth. Nevada went from zero to three and New Jersey from one to three.

"It's startling how rapid the changes are," said Dowell Myers, a University of Southern California housing demographer. "People assume that Latinos are poor and that they're not a factor in homeownership. They're really integrating economically."

The rate of homeownership among the nation's 42.7 million Hispanics hit a record 50 percent in the last quarter of 2005, according to the department of Housing and Urban Development. Low interest rates and flexible lending rules contributed to the spike. Twenty-five years ago, lenders would not even consider a spouse's income when evaluating a home loan, Karevoll said. Now, various relatives can qualify by pooling their earnings.

Hispanics are likely to make up 40 percent of first-time home buyers over the next 20 years, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.