Rangeley, Bethel and Sugarloaf real estate: financing a Maine ski home or condo

Most people shopping for ski property in Maine end up looking in three places. Sunday River sits in Newry, a few minutes from Bethel, and the condos along the access road and the trailside homes are what people ask about most. Sugarloaf is in Carrabassett Valley, a long way from anywhere, and buyers there usually want a condo they can ski to and lock up for the summer. Saddleback, outside Rangeley, has newer homes on the mountain and plenty of camps on the lakes nearby that work as a ski house in winter.

If you are browsing Rangeley, Bethel, Newry or Carrabassett Valley real estate, the loan questions are mostly the same, and the rest of this page walks through them.

Smaller hills matter too. A house near Shawnee Peak in Bridgton or Mt. Abram in Greenwood can be a second home for a family from southern New England that wants a weekend place without the Sugarloaf drive.

I'm Travis Penny, a Maine and Florida mortgage broker, and I'm not tied to one bank. I compare multiple lenders for your loan and then stay with it myself, start to finish. I started in 2004 and I'm still here.

This is the first question I ask, because it decides the loan. A second home loan is for a place you and your family use. You can rent it some weeks when you aren't there, but the lender needs it to be yours to use, and it can't be part of a rental pool or an agreement that gives a management company control over when you can stay.

If the plan is to rent it most of the winter and pay for it with that income, it's an investment property loan instead. That comes with a larger down payment, and on a second home loan the rent you expect to collect generally can't be used to help you qualify. I would rather sort that out on the first call than at underwriting.

When you buy a condo, the lender reviews the whole association, not just your unit. Things that can make a project harder to finance include a large share of units owned by one person or company, a lot of owners behind on dues, ongoing litigation, a thin reserve fund, or commercial space like a restaurant or ski shop in the building.

A condo that doesn't meet the standard rules is called non warrantable. That doesn't mean no. The lenders I work with have widened what they will take on non warrantable condos, and I can often find a fit. It does mean I want the association name and the condo questionnaire early, ideally before your offer is final.

Hotel style units are the toughest. If the building has a front desk, daily housekeeping, and owners who must put their unit into a rental program, most regular mortgage programs won't finance it. If that's what you're looking at, tell me the building name and I will tell you honestly whether I have a path.

A standalone house is simpler than a condo because there is no association to review. What the appraiser and lender look at is the house itself: it needs to be livable year round, with heat, a road you can get to, and a water and septic setup that works. Many houses around Rangeley and Bethel are on private roads, so a road maintenance agreement may come up. I've covered camps and lake houses in more detail on my Maine camps and lake homes page.

If you plan to build near the mountain, the one time close construction loan in Maine can cover the lot and the build in one loan, and my Maine land loans page explains buying the lot first.

Plenty of buyers pay for the ski place with equity from their main home. A Maine HELOC or a home equity loan on your primary home can cover the down payment or even the whole purchase on a smaller condo.

If you already own the ski condo and want to pull equity out of it, a second mortgage on a second home is possible too. Guidelines on some programs allow up to 85% of the home's value in combined loans on a second home, usually after you have owned it at least six months. Not everyone will qualify, and the condo project still has to be acceptable.

• The listing or the address, and for a condo the association name
• Whether you plan to use it yourself, rent it some, or rent it most of the year
• A rough idea of your down payment and where it is coming from
• Your recent income documents, or if you are self employed, how you are paid

Once I have that, I can tell you which loan fits and what the condo or house will need to pass. You can read more about second homes in general on my vacation home loans page, or contact me and we can go over a specific place.