Immigration reform said to boost housing recovery

The Obama administration’s ongoing efforts to overhaul immigration laws could serve as a boon to the national housing recovery, Bloomberg News reported.

The Mortgage Bankers Association is predicting that 2.8 million foreign nationals will become homeowners in the decade ending in 2020, compared with just 2.4 million in the previous 10 years. Buyers classified as foreign nationals will likely account for more than 50 percent of the rise in home buying in six states this decade, the association said.

“We’ve probably underappreciated this powerful force that is already resident here and is so upwardly mobile that it pushes up the housing market from the bottom,” said Dowell Myers, author of the MBA study. “There’s this incremental momentum that’s built up.”

Immigrants are more likely to feel positively about owning a home than people born in America, according to the Bloomberg News article. The longer they are allowed to remain in the U.S., the more likely they are to purchase a home, research shows. [Bloomberg News] – Katherine Clarke