The Vacation-Home Loan Is Rising Again. The Cash Buyer Still Decides.

Americans took out 4.1 percent more second-home mortgages in 2025 than in 2024, the first annual increase in four years and the first since the pandemic buying boom. Mortgages for primary homes rose 1 percent over the same stretch. The reading comes from Redfin's July 2026 analysis of federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data.

Keep it in proportion, because the honest number is smaller than the headline. Second homes were still only 2.7 percent of all mortgage originations in 2025, up from 2.6 percent the year before, and a long way below the 5.1 percent peak in 2021. Redfin's head of economics research, Chen Zhao, called it "a modest comeback" in "a very different market than it was during the pandemic."

Look at who is actually buying. In 2025, 85.2 percent of the vacation-home loans went to high earners, whose median income was $294,000. And because the count is built from mortgage disclosures, it only sees people who borrowed. Cash buyers do not show up in it at all.

That last point decides the story right now. Freddie Mac put the average 30-year fixed mortgage at 7.40 percent in the week of October 15, 2026, up from 6.27 percent a year earlier. At that price, a second home carried on debt is a heavy lift even for a household earning near $300,000. The people buying second homes in this market are largely the ones who do not need the loan, or who are rolling the gain from a long-held primary into the next place.

For a Carolinas buyer, that reframes the question. A second home in the Upstate, the Lowcountry, or the mountains only works if you can carry both houses as if you lived in each one full time, because in the months you are there, you do. Price it on its full-year cost, not the weekends you picture, and settle which state is home for tax purposes before you sign rather than after.

The rebound is real. It is also small and selective, which makes it a tell, not a green light: the buyers with the most room to move are moving first.

If a second home in the Carolinas is on your list, the advisory conversation is complimentary, and the carrying costs go in the model before the view does.