A share of an estimated $200 billion in mortgages is up for grabs for any lender which can figure out how to safely evaluate the non-traditional credit habits of Hispanic families who desire to own a home, according to a group of Latino housing professionals.

The thousands of Hispanics who have achieved their ownership goals have done so largely because lenders have lowered their credit standards and raised their debt-to-income ratios. But that "may not be the healthiest solution," either for consumers or lenders, said Frances Martinez Myers, chairman of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals at the group's annual convention in Las Vegas last week.

"Broadening the current credit spectrum to be more inclusive of culturally influenced Hispanic borrower traits is what the industry must begin to do in order to continue to close the Hispanic home ownership gap," said Martinez, who is Senior Vice President for business development at Fox & Roach/Trident, a Philadelphia-based realty firm. NAHREP's 14,000 members come from all facets of the housing sector.

Nearly a third of all U.S.-born Hispanic and more than half of all Mexican immigrants lack checking or savings accounts, according to the Census Bureau. And in a recent survey of 500 members, a third ranked "limited" or "no credit" as the first of second most significant barriers to ownership.

Moreover, a third of the respondents said the lack of credit was the most common reason loan applicants cannot qualify for a prime loan. The same third said more than half their clients end up with mortgages from subprime lenders who charge higher rates and fees.

While two-thirds of those polled said the lending community is doing a better job serving Latinos than it did just five years ago, three out of four said that for every client placed in a home, at least two wanna-be owners are turned away because they cannot qualify for financing.

"At least two are turned away, but some said they turn away people on a five-to-one ratio," said Gary Acosta, a co-founder of the seven-year-old organization, who called the two-to-one ratio "conservative."

Chairman-Elect Felix De Herrera, the president of Southwest Alliance in Austin, said NAHREP members believe Hispanics are "still being penalized rather than being rewarded for their consistency in meeting their financial obligations, even if it is in cash."

Several "very promising" credit scoring programs that underwrite immigrant and minority mortgage applicants using non-traditional forms of credit are available in the market, but "they are not being adopted to the degree we would like to see," said Acosta, who is chief executive officer of Prado Mortgage in San Diego.

These scoring systems are based on such things as cash income from multiple jobs, cash payments for cell phones, utilities and rent, and cash remittances sent to family members living in other countries.

Called "thin" because they don't contain credit and payment accounts, such profiles often are underwritten manually, which is not only more expensive but also considered more risky because of the subjective way in which these traits are weighed and evaluated by human underwriters.

Calling on lenders to "deploy" one or more of these "new matrixes," Acosta says "the time is right to take a leap of faith or adopt a change in strategy. Rather than lowering the bar, they should be more aggressive and more flexible."

The carrot at the end of the stick, NAHREP says, is an estimated $200 billion in potential new mortgages, a number extrapolated by the group based on Home Mortgage Disclosure Act figures and its survey findings.