The California Association of Realtors has launched a consumer-facing website for Spanish speakers looking for California real estate, the association has announced.
The site is Sucasa.net (the Spanish phrase "su casa" translates to "your house") and it is a sister site to the English-language California Living Network. Both are powered by Realtor.com and contain the same multiple listing service data.
"With Spanish ranking as the second most widely spoken language in the U.S. and Spanish speakers making up (a significant percentage) of California’s population, we recognize the market potential for this homebuyer population," said LeFrancis Arnold, CAR’s president, in a statement.
As of 2010, 28.9 percent of California’s population spoke Spanish or Spanish Creole, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Of the state’s 37.3 million inhabitants, 37.6 percent identified as Hispanic or Latino and of those in that group 5 and up, 76 percent spoke Spanish.
On Sucasa.net, users can search for for-sale homes or rentals by city and state or ZIP code and filter their search by price range, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, property type, property features, home size, lot size, and how long ago the property was built. Results appear in list view, map view or grid view.
The site took about six months to develop, according to CAR. The association used a combination of professional translators and a variety of focus groups to translate the site’s navigational elements and other standardized text.
Because of their sheer number and need for ongoing maintenance, property descriptions and listings details on the site are machine-translated, CAR told Inman News.
