Beltway Residents Head for Blue Ridge Hills

Today's washingtonpost.com offers a great illustration of what's happening in the second-home market.

It tells how a suburban family recently bought two properties at the Wintergreen Resort in Virginia's Blue Ridge mountains. One is a two-bedroom condominium near the ski slopes. The second: land where the family plans to build a house.

As the paper describes it, Humberto Vasquez "bought them so he, his wife and his two young boys could whoosh down the slopes in the winter, splash in the pools in the summer and play golf and tennis in the spring and fall on weekends away from Washington."

But -- and here's where the article echoes the just-published EscapeHomes.com survey -- "he also bought them with an eye toward making money."

"We mainly did it because we really like the place," said Vazquez, 46, an architect. 'But they're really good investments as well. Properties there are appreciating very fast." Wintergreen is less than a three-hour drive from the Beltway.