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If you’re one of the (roughly) 330K people who passed through Times Square on Friday, we hope you got a chance to see our logo in big on the Nasdaq MarketSite screen. If you didn’t, not to worry—we’ve got you covered below.

Our big thanks to the Nasdaq team for lending us their platform and helping us showcase Latin America’s opportunity in the Big Apple!

First Times Square…next, the world!

If you live in the Sun Belt region of the United States, you might have noticed changes in your neighborhood as of late. In recent years, in US states across the south and southwest, Latinos have been buying up sizable portions of the housing stock.

Multi-panel chart showing the percentage share of all foreign buyer purchases in key US states, highlighting Latin America's significant real estate investment | Sources: National Association of Realtors, Latinometrics
Latin America is buying up real estate in key US states

Beyond just homeowners seeking a place to live, though, there’s also Latin America’s growing investor class to consider. As some home countries in the region undergo economic growing pains (or downright crises), wealthier Latinos have taken to parking their money in stabler assets like the US housing market.

And what a market is is—one estimate has real estate contributing over a fifth of the entire Floridian gross domestic product, for example.

But not all Latin Americans are investing equally. As to be expected, some countries are much better represented in the buyer class when it comes to US real estate.

Horizontal bar chart comparing countries' share of foreign US real estate purchases, showing Mexico is a top buyer | Sources: National Association of Realtors, Latinometrics
Mexico is now a top buyer of US real estate

Mexico’s current position is an improvement over 2010s figures but technically a decrease from the first-place position it held in 2007 with 13%.

If the peso strengthens once more and recent macro trends are any indication, the country’s investor and homeowner class will continue to rise in importance in the US housing market. As one Californian public official quipped this week, “The city with the most Mexicans on Earth is Mexico City—second-place is Los Angeles.”

Beyond Mexico, we can see that Brazilians, Colombians, and even Cubans are buying up sizable shares of US housing stock. What does this all mean for the Sun Belt?

We’ll see with time and report back with any findings. For now, we just expect big improvements in the local food scene.