According to HousingWire, Movement Mortgage, a South Carolina-based lender that funds over twenty billion dollars in mortgages annually, has taken two significant steps to better serve Spanish-speaking homebuyers. The company launched a national Diverse Lending Support Team made up of bilingual staff members who work alongside loan officers to help them serve borrowers whose primary language is Spanish. This builds on their existing Comunidad platform, which has been offering Spanish-language mortgage services since 2016.
The new support team functions differently depending on who is using it. For loan officers who don't speak Spanish themselves, the bilingual team essentially becomes an extension of their business, letting them originate loans they previously couldn't handle. For Spanish-speaking loan officers, the team provides bilingual assistants and support staff to help manage the paperwork side of things, freeing them up to focus on building relationships and increasing their production.
In addition to the bilingual support initiative, Movement has brought its ITIN mortgage program entirely in-house. This means borrowers without Social Security numbers can now access financing up to eighty-five percent loan-to-value through Movement's own lending professionals. Previously, this type of lending was handled through brokers in a process that was complicated and came with higher fees. Handling it internally should make the experience simpler and less expensive for borrowers.
The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals projects that Latino households will represent a substantial portion of homeownership growth in the United States over the coming decades, which means language access and ITIN lending products are becoming increasingly important competitive advantages for mortgage companies.
What I am seeing locally here in the Bay Area and throughout the East Bay is that many qualified borrowers have been priced out of traditional lending channels simply because of documentation and language barriers. When a major lender like Movement invests in removing those obstacles, it creates real opportunities for families who've been on the sidelines of homeownership.
