Retirees have long driven much of the growth in Greater Sarasota. A new study from SmartAsset may drive that further after identifying the North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton area as one of the top 20 markets in the country to buy a second home.

“To find the hottest secondary home markets in the U.S., we compared data for 400 metro areas across two metrics: number of mortgages for secondary residences and total number of mortgages approved in 2018,” writes Nadia Ahmed, who penned the report.

The report found Florida, Arizona and the Carolinas as hotbeds, though a few locations in the Northeast top the list. Ocean City, New Jersey, is No. 1.

In Florida, Naples, The Villages, Panama City, Punta Gorda, and Cape Coral-Fort Myers all appear in the top 20 ahead of this region, but the North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton area still fares well at No. 18 in the country.

The report notes that in 2018, 2,758 of the 16,199 new mortgages (17%) were for second homes.

But notably, in terms of just the raw number of second home mortgages, this region ranked much higher, at No. 3 in the nation and No. 2 in the state of Florida. Only the Salisbury, Delaware area with 3,086 and the Fort Myers-Cape Coral area with 2,774 had a higher number of second-home mortgages, at least out of the Top 25 markets spotlighted in the SmartAsset study.