Habla Español? The Spanish Language as a Selling Feature

As most of us have noticed, business is getting scarce and we need every competitive edge that we can get our hands on. Numerous articles have been discussed on how we can improve our appraisal performance, but what about getting the appraisal orders? It is not feasible to just expect the work to flow in like it used to.  We we have to work extra hard to get it.

Lets discuss what is so overlooked that it will make your eyes pop out with joy.

Right now you can tap into an untouched market. The Spanish speaking market is huge!  Tapping into this market segment might keep you in business until the housing markets stabilize. According to the 2007 American Community Survey conducted by the United States Census Bureau, Spanish is the primary language spoken at home by over 34 million people aged 5 or older.

The U.S. is home to more than 45 million Hispanics, making it the world's second-largest Spanish-speaking community.  Now, think about how many in our own cities are Spanish speaking.  How many of our competitors are fluent in Spanish?  Why not teach ourselves to learn at least the phrases that are required to take a Spanish speaking phone call? After all, aren't all the appointment setting phone calls basically the same set of questions every single time?  By doing this, we can market ourselves as "Spanish Speaking" friendly and capture that extra business!

Secondly, once you learn some the key phrases you think you will need to conduct appraisal business with Spanish speakers, it would benefit you to also make yourself friendly on the Internet. As an example; you could get a Spanish interpreter to type something custom for your website.  Also, some appraisal web site providers have Spanish verisons of their template pages.  If so, going "bilingual" may be as simple as checking an option in the web site set-up options!

TIP: Make sure you put appraisal keywords in your Spanish paragraphs.  The next time the search engines crawl your site, they will be available to the Spanish speaking public when they are searching for a Spanish speaking Appraiser.

It might be about time for us all to start thinking of ourselves as not only Appraisers, but also business owners. We need to expand our market shares by expanding our market appeal to different language speakers, just as we would appeal to any other type of group, such as lawyers or CPA's.

Author: Aaron O. Thomas, Certified Residential Appraiser. Aaron is owner of San Diego Appraisers, a real estate appraisal service provider specializing in residential properties located in the greater San Diego County area. San Diego Appraisers service mortgage brokers, CPAs, lawyers, businesses and homeowners.