Vin Walker, a 67-year-old retiree from Plymouth, Mass., has been trying this year to buy a second home in Naples, Fla., so that he and his wife can avoid the cold winters in New England. He scoured real-estate brokerage sites for months, but listings would disappear days after they first showed up. As 2023 went on, the interest rates available to him also kept rising, with a bank quoting Walker a rate at one point of 8% on a 30-year mortgage.
“It felt like a race, watching the interest rates go up, as well as the price,” Walker said in an interview. “So it felt to us that we should accelerate our efforts before things got too far out of reach.” The search was complicated by a number of factors. Bill Sontag, the Naples-based real-estate broker who worked with Walker, told him that people who take out a mortgage for a second-home purchase are typically charged higher rates because lenders believe they are more likely to walk away from a loan. But another reason Walker’s search became so difficult is that housing prices in Naples have been skyrocketing. According to a MarketWatch analysis, Collier County, Fla., which includes Naple …
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