Marketing to Hispanic Households:

Technology can break the language barrier

By Randall Standard

More than half of all new homeowners from 2010 to 2020 will be Hispanic households, according to the Urban Institute.

This rapidly growing market, which added 320,000 households last year alone, accounted for 40% of all U.S. household growth.

In fact, more U.S. households  – nearly 38 million – speak Spanish at home, and that’s more than any other non-English language.

With the Hispanic homeownership rate overall at just 46%, the opportunity is huge.  That fact is certainly not lost on Mike Pappas, President and CEO of South Florida-based The Keyes Company. Pappas’s brokerage firm serves one of the largest and most dynamic Hispanic markets in the U.S.

His primary goal was to provide his agents with an easy-to-use mobile solution that could monitor and instantly report customer activity back to his agents immediately.

Pappas opted to use VoicePad for Keyes Company mobile sites because he was attracted to the integration with their yard signage, text platform and, one more feature: VoicePad’s Spanish audio tour narration technology.

Breakthrough Automated Narration Technology for MLS data

For years VoicePad has been known for its English narration technology, taking an MLS feed of property data and automatically creating narration content to create and post a photograph-based virtual tour of every property on the MLS.

Now VoicePad has developed a new audio platform, automatically translating the same MLS feed of property data into a Spanish narration, giving every listing bilingual narration.

Imagine all your marketing content — your MLS-driven virtual tours, website, curbside marketing efforts and rental inquiries — all presented in a perfect Spanish sentence-structure.

This is not simply converting web text into Spanish text.  That’s old technology and has been around for years. This uses Natural Voice Technology that is brand new for real estate.

What this technology does is solve the language barrier issue.  Think of what this means in terms of marketing to a Hispanic audiences if you can provide property information in Spanish by phone with live transfers that automatically route Spanish-speaking inquiries to Spanish-speaking agents.  It means you don’t have to speak Spanish to help customers that are more comfortable communicating in their native voice.

VoicePad technology removes the language barrier from the real estate sales process. This breakthrough allows “English-only” agents to compete on Spanish-speaking lead-generation efforts.

The cost savings are enormous now that virtual tours can now be narrated in Spanish (and English) without the need for expensive voice talent.

This new VoicePad technology gives every agent a new way to help more buyers. If you can’t help a buyer, you will lose them either to someone on your team who can, or worse, to another company.

Adding the ability to deliver automated property narration in Spanish and English at the curb reduces the risk of calls from buyers not being handled correctly because of a language barrier.

VoicePad is already updating 3 million tours narrated in conversational Castilian Spanish every 120 minutes, automatically from MLS data.

The Hispanic market opportunity is huge, and we can use technology to serve one of America’s fastest growing home buying markets, even if you don’t “Habla Español.”

Test out both our English and Spanish MLS data narration – Simply Text 81003 to (502) 653-8127, then click the link the text reply.