Hola! Aquí estamos. Are you ready, or not?

Hola! Aquí estamos. Are you ready, or not?

We are an assortment of cultures and ethnicities in America. Savvy multifamily marketers know they must learn “who” their audience, or target market, is in order to effectively lease more apartments.   One of every four Americans is ethnic or foreign born. 

The largest cultural groups found in the US today are Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and European. 

With numbers totaling 50.5 million, Hispanics are the largest minority group in the US, representing 16.3 % of the total population.  The buying power of Hispanics, which are an ethnic group but not a racial group, will rise from $1 trillion in 2010 to $1.5 trillion in 2015, accounting for nearly 11 percent of the nation’s total buying power. The Hispanic market alone, at $1 trillion, is larger than the entire economies of all but 14 countries in the world–smaller than the GDP of Canada but larger than the GDP of Indonesia.

Nearly half of all Hispanics in the US – nearly 25 million people – rent their homes.

Apartment owners and managers in the South and the West should take note as the 2010 Census indicated more than three-quarters of the Hispanic population lived in the West or South.  That does not mean Northern or Eastern property management professionals should forgo bonding with this group.  Larger MSA’s such as Chicago, New York, New York and others should seek to connect with Latinos as well. 

So how Multicultural are YOU?  What are you doing to better engage your Latino prospects and residents? How do you recruit, hire, train and retain the best Latino employees? 

To be competitive we must be more than culturally tolerant.  We must be multicultural.  The Multiplicity Marketplace Intelligence© quiz is a great starting point to assess your understanding of different cultures and ethnicities.