The United States is increasingly a multilingual country. Year over year residents who speak a language other than English are growing as a percentage of the population. Native Spanish speakers represent by far the largest slice of the pie. While the pandemic has dampened immediate sales, the current lull is a good time to prepare marketing, sales and legal documentation to better serve non-English speakers and get positioned to satisfy pent-up demand. Document translation services, some free and others for a fee, can help you level up your multilingual real estate selling abilities. We’ll consider practical steps for cost-effectively translating your sales collateral into all relevant languages so you can benefit from these powerful home-buying trends. 

Translating the Market: What Do You Call the Spanish-Speaking Homebuyers?

In the United States, the growing Spanish-speaking population represents the greatest growth opportunity for real estate agents and realty companies. Before delving into practical steps for satisfying Spanish speaking home buyers with document translation services, let’s be clear about the terminology. Technically, Hispanic refers to all Spanish-language populations, whereas Latino is used to refer to individuals from Latin American countries. 

US government agencies use both words, often separated by an “or” to avoid offense to those who might identify with one rather than the other. In practice, “Latino” is used mostly in the western US whereas “Hispanic” is used more in the eastern part. Nomenclature is secondary to need to translate your essential documents into Spanish. It’s less important what you call this rising market. More important that you call them in their preferred language.

How to Translate Changing Linguistic Demographics into Sales?

The numbers speak for themselves. In 2019, Hispanics comprised 18% of the U.S. population, they accounted for nearly 63% of gains in new U.S. homeownership, according to the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals. While other ethnic groups were declining in new homebuying, Latinos were surging. Not surprisingly, Hispanic homeowners are concentrated in the Sunbelt, but several northeastern and midwestern states also report double-digit home ownership by native Spanish-speakers.

Translate property listings, brochures about projects or specific properties, public relations and web posts, social media and of course contracts and financial documents. Even if English remains the language of record for much of the paperwork, translating every important document shows respect and consideration for potential homebuyers. The marginal cost of preparing multilingual documentation is more than justified by the increased likelihood of closing the sale. In a highly competitive real estate markets, small advantages in buyer perception can mean the difference between signing both buyers and sellers, and between winning and losing deals.

What are the Most Cost-Effective Translation for Real Estate Agents?

The need for multilingual documents may be obvious, but it begs the question of how best to obtain high quality, cost-effective translation services?  Like most things, the marketplace for professional translation services has moved almost completely online. The market is dominated by larger translation companies which field virtual networks of hundreds or even thousands of contracted translators, interpreters, editors and proofreaders for almost any language pair under the sun. 

To find a translation agency most suitable to your needs, simply initiate an online search using keywords like “translation” “Spanish” “real estate” to obtain a short-list of candidate agencies. Check out their websites and query those which look most professional with a description of your translation needs. Then engage the companies on your short-list to evaluate the chemistry. For the most part, pricing is based on cost-per-word in the source document, with a US average of $0.12 per word being for English to Spanish translations.

The benefits of working with an agency is that professional translation services provide a “one stop shop” to save your personal time. As a rule, communicate your requirements, agree on price and timetable, then collect quality-assured documents without need to interact with the linguists themselves.

Can Free and Freelance Translation Services Help You Cut Costs?

The main drawback of working with a translation agency is price. Translating a full suite of printed collateral and online content for a typical realty company can run into the thousands of dollars. For this reason, it is tempting to turn to freelance translators available on marketplaces like Upwork or Freelancer.com. Like other marketplaces, you can inspect translator profiles and compare rates, ratings and reviews, then negotiate a final deal, with the website providing escrow services, holding your payment until the translator completes the work to your satisfaction. Working this way may demand more of your personal time, but it can cut translation costs substantially.

One important tip is to hire freelance translators in pairs, one to check the work of the other and to serve as backup if the other flakes or fails to deliver the expected quality. 

Finally, don’t neglect free translation services like Google Translate or Microsoft Translator. While machine translation will not match an experience human translator, these free services can help you make sense of incoming emails or websites in a foreign language. Just don’t rely on them to translate content for publication or outgoing communications lest your would-be homebuyer gets lost in translation.