The Kennedys and Palm Beach, Fla.

From the Florida website: According to Barron’s, the town of Palm Beach, Fla. is the ninth-best place for a second home in America. “This pedigreed place — the Kennedys and the Vanderbilts had oceanfront homes for decades — got its groove back in 2010, as residents recovered from the Bernie Madoff scandal and the ravages of the credit crisis,” the magazine proclaims. It calls the town part of the so-called “Iron Triangle” or American high society, along with New York and the Hamptons. First on the list was Sea Island, Ga., with Maui second. [more]

At a time when many Americans are having trouble affording the mortgages on their primary residences, developers of vacation homes are getting creative in their efforts to convince buyers to take on second homes. According to the Wall Street Journal, one popular tactic is to offer cabins and cottages — dubbed “affordable housing for the affluent” — that are pre-built instead of custom and located on smaller lots. Home builders are “offering discounts by doing almost everything except for slashing prices” in an effort not to bring down the property values of existing homeowners in vacation communities, said the Journal’s Juliet Chung.

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Prices for Miami real estate have dropped as much as 43 percent from the 2006 peak

From the February issue:
For some Manhattan renters, buying a second home is coming before buying a first. While New York real estate has seen severe discounts (Manhattan prices are down roughly 20 percent from their peak), some New Yorkers are going to real estate markets like Miami or the Hamptons that have been burned by even deeper discounts. In the Hamptons, prices have dropped as much as 30 percent since 2006, said Barbara Weber, managing director of Nest Seekers International in the Hamptons. In Miami they have dropped as much as 43 percent, compared to the city’s historic high in 2006, according to Peter Zalewski, a broker with the Bal Harbour-based Condo Vultures Realty. “You can literally buy five condos in Miami for the price of one in New York,” said Ron Shuffield, president of EWM Realtors in Miami. New Yorkers are also taking advantage of foreclosures and short sales in the Miami-Dade area, said Alfredo Vizcarrondo, president of the AV Group in Doral, a real estate company. “In the last quarter of the year, there [was] increased interest from New Yorkers,” said Vizcarrondo. He said he recently closed on properties in Miami’s Brickell area and in Aventura for prices as low as $160,000.  [more]

Some renters have decided now is the time to buy because prices and
interest rates are down, but New York City real estate is still out of
reach, and the renters are instead shopping for second homes in the
country. Real estate agents throughout the Hudson Valley and in other
second-home markets, including the North Fork of Long Island and the
Jersey Shore, say that sales have picked up recently with potential
buyers from the city. One woman looking to buy an apartment in the city
found that she could only afford studios, so she decided to stay in her
Park Slope rental and instead buy a three-story home for less than
$300,000 upstate. Brokers estimate that prices in the Hudson Valley are
down about 10 to 15 percent from last year, and that most buyers are
looking in the $250,000 to $450,0000 range. [more]