Photo via Flagstaff City Government
By Ben Geier | Smart Asset
While the coronavirus pandemic has impacted millions of Americans with businesses shuttering and companies laying off employees, the secondary home market is seeing an unexpected surge. Remote workers are temporarily relocating from larger cities to less dense, more comfortable spaces.
The real estate brokerage firm Redfin reported that the demand for second homes jumped 100% in October 2020 when compared to the previous year. This outpaces the demand for primary homes, which only saw a 50% increase during that same period in their study. Keeping in mind that many remote workers are still looking for second homes, SmartAsset crunched the numbers to find out which secondary home markets are the most popular.
To find the hottest secondary home markets, we found the number of mortgages issued for secondary homes in 2019 in nearly 400 metro areas across the country. We then divided this by the total number of mortgages issued to calculate the percentage of the market made up of second homes. For details on our data sources and how we put all the information together to create our final rankings, check out the Data and Methodology section below.
