Pembroke Pines Just Topped a National Ranking. The Real Story Is About Homeownership.

Pembroke Pines and Fort Lauderdale both landed in the top three nationally in WalletHub's newly released 2026 ranking of the best cities for Hispanic entrepreneurs. The study covered more than 180 U.S. cities. Florida took eleven spots on the list, and nine of them sit inside the top ten.

WalletHub built the ranking from 23 measures split across two categories: how friendly a city's conditions are for Hispanic-owned businesses, and how much purchasing power Hispanic households actually hold once cost of living is factored in. Business ownership rates, entrepreneurship rates, startup growth, corporate tax rank, and income all fed into the score.

Pembroke Pines carries the highest Hispanic entrepreneurship rate of any city in the study. Almost 48 percent of the city's population is Hispanic, and roughly a third of its businesses are Hispanic owned, the fourth highest share nationally. Those numbers explain the ranking. They are not the number that made me stop scrolling.

The number that got my attention sits in a separate part of the study. Pembroke Pines has the fourth highest share of Hispanic homeowners in the country, residents who own their home instead of renting it. A different metric than the entrepreneurship numbers above, and the city still lands near the top of it.

Fort Lauderdale tells a related story from another angle. The city ties for the highest share of Hispanic owned businesses of any city WalletHub studied, and it ranks at the top of the country for the share of young businesses, four to fifteen years old, that have grown to five or more employees. That second figure is a growth signal, not a snapshot. It says businesses that start here tend to keep hiring.

I have sat across the table from enough small business owners in west Broward to notice this pattern before I ever saw it written up in a study. The client who just opened a second location almost always asks sharper questions about equity than the client who has never run a business. They think about a house the way they think about a shop, as something you build value in over years, not something you pay for one month at a time. A city with this much entrepreneurial density was always going to produce homeowners at an above average rate. The two numbers move together because the people behind them are frequently the same people.

None of this means Pembroke Pines or Fort Lauderdale are suddenly undervalued or about to spike. A ranking like this is a signal about the people who live in a city, not a price prediction, and I would be doing you a disservice to pretend otherwise. But if you are running a business in either city and still renting, the math is worth running with an actual person instead of a mortgage calculator app. Entrepreneurs qualify for loans differently than W-2 buyers do, using bank statements, profit and loss history, or asset depletion instead of a single pay stub, and plenty of lenders still handle that conversation badly.

If that describes you, reach out and we will walk through what you actually qualify for before you assume anything based on last year's tax return.

Roger Averbuj, Broker | Prestige Heritage Realty | (954) 663-8461

Source: WalletHub, "Best Cities for Hispanic Entrepreneurs in 2026"