Overcome language barriers between you and your clients

For the fourth consecutive year, President Bush has designated June as National Homeownership Month in effort to increase minority homeownership. In 2002, President Bush challenged the Office of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to create 5.5 million new minority homeowners by the end of the decade and the office reported June 18 that it is already halfway to that goal.

Despite such an aggressive initiative, there are still factors keeping minorities from owning their own home. Lack of understanding and information about the home buying process remains one of the biggest barriers to minority homeownership – especially for families for whom English is a second language. Today nearly one in five people speak a language other than English at home.

Because minorities have become such an important market for real estate, many REALTORS® have begun looking for ways to incorporate other languages into their marketing and communications. You're ahead of the game in this area because your Agent XSite website comes with more than 60 content pages that can be translated into Spanish, French, German and Portuguese with just a few clicks. To set up multiple languages on your site, go to Step 6 in your XSite's Wizard and scroll to the bottom of the page where you can check the boxes to enable any or all of the languages. Then, visitors can click on the link of the language they speak when they visit your XSite and your web pages will translate into the language they select.

In addition to your XSite, there are other tools that can help break down the language barrier between you and your clients. There are a number of free translation websites such as www.freetranslation.com and www.worldlingo.com that can help you translate documents to and from various languages. World Lingo even offers translation services for Microsoft Office XP, which provides translations for single words, phrases and entire documents.

Google.com also has a language translation tool that allows you to search for specific pages in another language and translates text and websites into different languages. You can also set your Google homepage, messages, and buttons to display in another language – even Klingon!

Today's minority groups are projected to comprise nearly one-half of the increase in homeowners between 2000 and 2020. Language tools that can help your clients better understand the home buying process will result in more knowledgeable clients, and of course, more homeowners!