Haiti declared itself the world’s first Black republic in 1804, free and meant to be its own. That claim, a people holding what is theirs, is the part of the culture she carried here. Haitians abroad sent home $4.1 billion in 2024, equal to 16.9 percent of the economy, according to the World Bank. Money sent home keeps a family fed, but it does not put a name on a title. In this country, a deed is the main thing an ordinary household owns and the main thing it passes on. Freedom, for her, is unfinished until somebody can point to a house and say it is theirs. That is the difference she is selling.
She left Haiti in 2007, before the magnitude 7.0 earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010, and settled in Mississippi, where the Census Bureau counted 384 residents of Haitian ancestry in 2024. New Jersey had more than 73,000. She arrived with no English, no class to attend and no one at home to practice with. She taught herself, she says, and was speaking it within five months.
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Nursing school demanded more than conversation. The textbooks were in English she was still building, so she translated the coursework back into French, learned the lesson, and turned to YouTube when the translation was not enough. Eight Black students were admitted to her program, and three graduated. She was one of them. Her first test came back a C, and she cried. She never repeated a class. When her instructors offered extra time on exams, she says, she told them: “I don’t need special treatment. I’m going to take my test just like everybody else.” She passed her boards on the first try.
She has spent 14 years as a psychiatric nurse, and her RN license is active in New Jersey. The work taught her to listen for what somebody is not saying out loud: the credit worry, the savings gap, the partner who is not sure yet. She works in Union, Essex and Morris counties under the name Home Match By Syndie, alongside RE/MAX First Realty II. She was the first in her family to buy a home. Her referrals come largely from colleagues at her hospital, a part of the business she calls From Shift to Keys, which moves nurses from overtime to ownership. She says many Haitian families believe buying is out of reach, and some hide it when they have bought. “I want to be the Haitian realtor in New Jersey,” she says.
The arithmetic is against the buyers she most wants to reach. Freddie Mac put the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate at 7.03 percent in late September, compared with 2.96 percent across 2021. With 10 percent down on Essex County’s median price of $700,000, the payment is $4,204 a month before taxes and insurance. The same loan cost $2,643 four years ago. The median Black household in the county earns about $5,526 a month before taxes. A third of Black households in Essex own their homes, compared with 63.9 percent of New Jersey households overall. The state offers first-time buyers up to $15,000 toward a down payment, and $7,000 more if their parents never owned a home.
The news from home has not made her less sure. The International Organization for Migration counted 1.49 million displaced people in a survey published in late September. In June, the United Nations said gangs controlled up to 90 percent of Port-au-Prince and its surroundings, with homes ransacked and set ablaze. A deed is only worth what the country behind it will enforce, and New Jersey will enforce one.
Ms. Berrette says it hurts to see that “we don’t have anything or anyone we can say, ‘Okay, this is ours.'” Getting a Haitian family to closing is her answer to that sentence.
She is still on the ward, spending her free time taking families to closing. She works with people who have been told, or who have decided on their own, that homeownership is important. Home Match By Syndie serves Union, Essex and Morris counties, and anywhere in New Jersey she is asked to go.
