How to buy a second home in Florida, one step at a time.

Same first step as any purchase. Different rulebook.

A second home is its own category to a lender. The minimum down payment is higher, the reserves are higher, and the rental income you are counting on does not count. FHA and VA loans are for the home you live in, not the one you visit.^{4, 5} None of that is a problem if you know it going in. It is a problem at the closing table.

Get pre-qualified with a Florida lender who writes second-home loans every week and who knows how HOA dues and CDD assessments land in your debt-to-income ratio. Then tell them, honestly, how you plan to use the place. A home you rent out most of the year is an investment property to the lender, and pretending otherwise is the fastest way to lose the loan.⁶

Cash changes the conversation. Nationally, all-cash purchases hit a record 26% of sales in the year to mid-2025, and nearly one in three repeat buyers paid cash.⁷ In Sarasota County, 37.3% of single-family closings in August 2026 were cash. For condos it was 59.8%.² If that is you, skip the lender and go straight to step three.

Rates are higher. The down payment expectation is higher. And the incentives are written for someone else.

Start with the rate. Second-home mortgages typically price 0.25 to 0.75 percentage points above a primary-residence loan, depending on who you ask.^{11, 12} The bigger surprise is the fee behind the rate. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac charge a loan-level price adjustment on second homes that is now identical to the investment-property fee: 3.375 points with 20% down, and 4.125 points with less than that.^{3, 13} On a $500,000 loan, 3.375 points is $16,875, paid up front or baked into the rate. That is why the practical down payment on a second home tends to be 25% or more, not the 10% minimum.

Then the incentives. The advertised builder rates you see on flyers and billboards are real, and they are usually for principal residences only. The D.R. Horton offer at Wellen Park in April 2026 said so in the fine print. So does the M/I Homes rate program running through the end of 2026, and so did Taylor Morrison's 2025 reduced-rate promotion. Lennar's standard offer terms say the same.^{14, 15, 16, 17} Second-home buyers still get incentives. They are just different ones: closing-cost credits, design-center money, lot premiums waived, price reductions on quick move-in homes. We negotiate those every month. Just do not build your budget around the rate on the flyer.

Do not shop for a second home you cannot close on in the next six months.

This is the rule we ask every second-home client to accept. Rate locks run 30, 45 or 60 days, and extending one costs real money.^{18, 19} Builder promotions run for weeks, with a contract-by date and a close-by date.^{14, 15} Quick move-in inventory changes monthly. If your plan is to buy sometime in the next couple of years, the numbers you gather today will be wrong by the time you act, and the community you fall for may be sold out.

Ready means the money is in place and the pre-approval or proof of funds is current. Willing means the decision-makers in your family agree this is happening. Able means you can travel here, sign, insure and close inside a normal contract window. When all three are true, we start. When they are not, we keep you on the list and tell you when something worth a flight comes up.

A place you rent out sometimes and a place you rent out mostly are two different purchases.

The IRS gives you a clean line: rent it for fewer than 15 days a year and the rental income is not even reported.²⁰ Rent it more than that and it is rental income, with rental deductions. To keep deducting the mortgage interest as a second home, you also have to use it yourself for more than 14 days, or more than 10% of the days it is rented, whichever is longer.²¹ Your accountant will have opinions. Have that conversation before you buy, not in April.

Florida has its own rules. Rent the whole home more than three times a year for stays under 30 days, or advertise it as a vacation rental, and the state requires a lodging license.^{22, 23} Then the local rules kick in, and they vary block by block. The City of Sarasota requires a seven-night minimum and a registration certificate. Unincorporated Sarasota County allows stays under 30 days on the barrier islands only in multi-family zoning. Holmes Beach requires 30 days in its single-family districts and seven in others.^{24, 25, 26} Most new-construction communities add their own lease minimums in the HOA documents, so read them before you buy. If short-term income is part of your plan, we screen for it first.

You are choosing a place you will fly into, not a place you will commute from.

That flips the usual priorities. The drive to work matters less. The drive from the airport, the beach, the boat and the restaurants matters more. So does what the place feels like in the months you will actually be here, which for most second-home owners means January through April. Sarasota County counts about 487,640 permanent residents and a winter population that can top 570,000.²⁷ Manatee County gains roughly 75,000 seasonal residents.²⁸ Traffic countywide runs about 14% above the annual average in early March in Sarasota County, and the beach corridors run higher.²⁹ That is the season you are buying into.

The good news is that you will have company. Roughly 15% of all homes in Sarasota County and 12% in Manatee County are seasonal or occasional-use homes, and in the City of Venice it is 22.5%.¹ The visitors who eventually buy come mostly from the Midwest and the Northeast, which explains the Chicago and Boston accents at the tiki bar.³⁰ And getting here keeps getting easier: SRQ set a passenger record in 2025, Punta Gorda grew 18.5%, and Tampa handled 24.8 million.^{31, 32, 33} Use The Guide to see the five areas, the real drive times, and who lives in each one.

Lock and leave, or a house with a lawn? Decide that before you tour anything.

For a home you will leave empty for months, the community does part of the ownership for you. Gated entries, lawn care included, a clubhouse that keeps the social calendar going while you are away, and an HOA that will notice a broken sprinkler line before it becomes a swamp. Villas and maintenance-included single-family homes exist for exactly this buyer. So do condos, with one big caveat below.

Florida rewrote its condominium law after Surfside. Buildings three habitable stories or taller now need a structural integrity reserve study every ten years, and the reserves it identifies can no longer be waived for budgets adopted after December 31, 2024.³⁴ Buildings must pass a milestone inspection at 30 years, or 25 if the local authority requires it near salt water, and every ten years after that.³⁵ Older buildings are catching up on decades of deferred maintenance, and the bills are landing on owners. A new building starts with a fresh roof, fresh reserves and none of that history. It is one of the strongest arguments for new construction we make to second-home buyers, and we make it a lot.

Now, and only now, walk the models.

By this step you know the money, the timing, the use, the area and the community. That is why the search is short and calm. Register us as your agent before your first visit to a sales center; most builders will not recognize your representation after the fact. Then we do what we do: which lot, which plan, what the incentives are really worth for a second-home buyer, and what is negotiable this month. In September 2026, 66% of builders were offering incentives and 38% had cut prices, by 6% on average.³⁷ You will not see those numbers on the billboard.

If you are buying to-be-built, remember the clock from step three: a single-family home in the South took about 6.6 months to finish in 2025, start to completion.³⁸ Quick move-in homes skip that entirely, and they are where second-home buyers find the best price concessions. Either way, inspect it. New does not mean perfect. An independent inspection before closing, and before drywall on a build, catches what the builder's own walk-through will not.

The house will be empty for months at a time. Your insurance company will want to know that.

Most homeowners policies carry a vacancy clause that limits or removes coverage if the home is unoccupied for 30 to 60 consecutive days.³⁹ A second home needs a policy written for seasonal or secondary occupancy, and it may cost more than the one on your primary home.⁴⁰ Citizens, the state-backed insurer of last resort, defines seasonal as unoccupied for three or more consecutive months.⁴¹ Tell the truth on the application. A claim denied for misrepresented occupancy is a very expensive way to save a few hundred dollars.

Flood insurance is required if the home sits in a special flood hazard area and the loan is federally backed, and a new policy takes 30 days to start unless it is bought in connection with your mortgage, in which case it starts at closing.^{42, 43} Many of the waterfront and island addresses second-home buyers love are in those zones. Then the good news: a home built to the 2001 Florida Building Code or later is eligible for a minimum 68% discount on the hurricane-wind portion of the premium once your insurer has a wind mitigation form.⁴⁴ New construction, again, is the easy way to earn it.

It is not your homestead. That changes three things.

First, no homestead exemption. Florida's exemption is for your permanent residence, so a second home gets none of it.⁴⁵ Second, a different cap. Homesteads are protected by Save Our Homes, which limits assessment increases to 3% a year or the inflation rate, whichever is lower; for 2026 it is 2.7%. Non-homestead residential property is capped at 10% a year instead, and that cap does not apply to school taxes.^{46, 47, 48} Third, everything resets when a property changes hands: the assessed value goes back to full market value, so the low tax bill the previous owner enjoyed is not the bill you will get.⁴⁹

On the federal side, the mortgage interest deduction covers up to $750,000 of combined debt on your main home and one second home, for mortgages taken out after December 15, 2017.²¹ And the arithmetic on the local bill is simple: the 2025 countywide millage in Sarasota County, everywhere except Longboat Key, North Port and Venice, was 11.4737, which is $11.47 of tax for every $1,000 of taxable value, or about $11,474 per $1 million.⁵⁰ The cities add their own on top: Sarasota 3.4078, Venice 4.1855, North Port 3.7667. Ask us for the estimate on any specific address; the county property appraiser sites will produce one in about a minute.

You do not have to be in Florida to close on a Florida home.

Purchase loans closed in a record-fast 36.8 days on average in March 2026, and Florida law lets an online notary complete your documents by audio-video with you in any state and the notary here.^{51, 52} Title companies here do mail-away and remote closings every day. If you would rather sign in person and then walk straight onto the beach, we will plan the trip around the closing date.

Two things we insist on. First, a final walk-through, in person or on a live video call with us holding the phone, with your inspector's list in hand. Second, the wire rule: never send money based on an email alone. Call the title company at a number you looked up yourself and confirm the instructions by voice. Then set the house up for your absence: home watch, water shutoff, smart thermostat, mail forwarding, utilities on autopay, and a neighbor or the HOA manager with your number.

A lot of second homes become first homes. Plan for that possibility now.

You are not alone in doing this. Second-home mortgages rose 4.1% in 2025 and the typical second home was worth $515,000, with the Tampa metro's median at $425,000.⁵³ Meanwhile Florida added 196,680 residents in the year to July 2025, second only to Texas, and the Sarasota metro ranked second in the country among places relocating home searchers wanted to move to in early 2026.^{54, 55} Plenty of those people started with a winter place.

If that turns out to be you, the switch is mostly paperwork. Make the home your permanent residence, file for the homestead exemption with the county property appraiser by March 1, and Save Our Homes starts capping your assessment from there.⁵⁶ Our relocation roadmap covers the rest: the driver license, the vehicles, the sale back home and the order that makes it calm. Until then, come down, put your feet in the sand, and send us a photo. That is the whole point.