How long to wait before converting a second home into investment?

[Elliot Wagner]

We're buying a second home for vacation purposes financing it as a second home, but renting it out when we're not there. In the first year after purchase, we're planning to live there for 3 months, which will help us meet the second home occupancy requirements without a problem.

A couple of questions we have:

- Down the line (say after a year), can we convert it to a full time vacation rental? Would the lender have problems with that? I know that for a primary residence, you can convert it to a rental property after a year, but not sure what the rules are for second homes. Haven't been able to find any guidelines related to this.

- Down the line, if we are able to convert this property to a full time vacation rental investment property, can we then buy another second home (with second home financing terms) in the same area? Second homes need to be at least 70 miles apart, but since technically, the original property will have become no longer our second home, would we then be allowed to finance another second home in the area?

If anyone has experience with this type of situation would love to hear how this is handled by lenders. Depending on how it's viewed, we'd like to optimize our strategy for the kind of property we want to finance as investment vs second home and how to sequence the property purchases.