New website brings new home information to Houston's Hispanic consumers

Source: CasaNuevaHouston.com News Release

August 2005 -- A new website is helping Houston's builders and developers answer the call of a growing group of consumers who have become a significant force in the local and national economy.

CasaNuevaHouston.com is Houston's first complete online resource, offered in Spanish and now in English, designed specifically for Spanish speaking homebuyers. The site gives visitors information on the Houston market's new homes and communities, and all of the tools they need to attain the dream of homeownership.

Enhanced by images of home and family, the site effectively blends the emotions of purchasing a new home, with the important details of how to achieve that goal.

Launched in July, the website features everything from personal stories of buyers who, like many, have found that they can afford a new home for what they have been paying in rent; to the important items needed to begin the home-buying process.

Site visitors can also utilize a mortgage calculator to find out how much home they can afford, check a list of documents needed to purchase a new home, and use a search page to find locations of new homes and communities, with information on price ranges, schools and amenities.

Links to various programs offering assistance in down payment and financing can be found on the site as well.

Casanuevahouston.com. answers some of the most common questions posed by home shoppers and even offers an "ask the experts" section, promising a response to questions from an expert in the industry within 24 hours.

The new site is the result of a partnership of three Houston professionals who are experienced in working with Houston's real estate market. Damon Thomas, Anita Sparks-Bohn and Lisa Zapalac are the principal partners of Houston Online Media Enterprises, the company that owns the casanuevahouston.com name, and plans on expanding into other key Texas markets with similar sites. Both Thomas and Zapalac are the owners of public relations agencies specializing in the promotion of homebuilders and developers; and Sparks-Bohn brings more than 25 years of experience in media sales and management, with strong emphasis on real estate sales and multi-cultural marketing. She is also a principal partner of a media agency, Universal Media Sales, specializing in ethnic media sales for newspaper and radio across the United States.

Casanuevahouston.com has been created in response to a growing need, says Thomas who gained feedback from his own real estate pr clients wanting to expand their marketing efforts to reach the growing Hispanic market.

"Houston's Hispanic population is growing and predicted to be an even more dominant group both locally and nationally over the next five years," Thomas said. "Hispanic consumers are among the most recognized group of internet shoppers and although there are a variety of resources available online, there isn't a site that brings everything together like CasaNuevaHouston."

Within the United States, more than 12.9 million Hispanics are Internet users and Houston ranks No. 4 among the top 20 Hispanic markets in the nation. The Tomas Rivera Institute, which studies the habits of Latinos in the US, estimates that at least 1.5 million households will purchase homes by 2010.

A 2004 study by Ahorre Hispanic Marketing Services reports that nearly half of Hispanic consumers who speak some Spanish want more web advertising in Spanish and nearly one in four consumers say that advertising in Spanish makes them more likely to purchase a product that was marketed to them in Spanish. The same study found that more than half of offline Hispanics expected to get internet connection by 2006.