Years in the making, a new real estate industry trade certification will help consumers quickly find professional representation with experience specific to the second-home market.

Available to National Association of Realtors members beginning in January 2006, the resort and second-home property specialist certification will be granted to those who complete coursework specific to the second-home sector.

The certification also officially designates the resort and second-home industry as a specific real estate industry sector, along with commercial, international, buyer representation and other sectors.

The certification follows last year's 2005 National Association of Realtors profile of second-home buyers, an NAR report that found, among all homes purchased in 2004, 36 percent were second-home purchases--about two-thirds of them were purchased as investment properties and another third as vacation homes. Thirty-eight percent of the homes of the nation's existing housing stock are second homes.

Statistics, however, belie how second homes are actually used. Some investment properties later become retirement homes. Vacation homes are frequently rented out when the owner isn't vacationing. And resort investment properties are also used by the owner when they aren't being rented out.

Managing such a purchase--both as a structure and as an investment--is enough to require specialized professional help, but there's much more.

"The single most important thing this certification can give Realtors is insight into how the second-home market is significantly different for their buyers. They are buying something they want, not something they need. Even if they don't plan on renting it out, buyers are looking for investment values, so RSPSes really need to know the market," said Christine Karpinski, real estate investor and author of Profit From Your Dream Vacation Home (Dearborn, $19.95) and other second-home investment books.

"Often, good second-home agents concentrate only on a very small geographic area, so they can truly be experts in their market. Also, fostering long-term relationships with their buyers is important since most often it takes 18 months to three years for buyers to make the plunge. The certification should help inform agents about all this," added Karpinski, also director of owner advocacy for the WVR Group, a network of vacation rental listing websites.

Detailed requirements for the new RSPS certification are available online on NAR's website (http://www.realtor.org/resort), but generally call for the successful completion of two NAR-accredited required courses and a choice of two NAR-accredited electives.

The required courses, both two-day sessions, are the "Resort and Second-home Markets Course" and the "Tax-Deferred (1031) Exchange Course." The two electives can be selected from among a host of courses relating to residential property management, small business property management, international real estate, real estate investments and commercial real estate investments. Attending a resort symposium also helps meet the elective requirement.

Certified agents will be allowed to display the "RSPS" certification on business and marketing documents.

While certification comes with educational-only requirements, NAR fully expects RSPS-certified agents to have on-the-job experience general to the second-home market and specific to the geographic market they serve.

More than 140,000 NAR member real estate agents already work in resort and second-home markets--a 30 percent increase from the previous year, according to NAR.

"There isn't any question about it. Most of our people who get certification have already been around NAR for a long time and just haven't had the opportunity to get certified in this specialty," said Ben Blair, chairman of NAR's resort and second-home committee, and a real estate developer and owner of Kansas Development in Topeka, Kansas.

Real estate practitioners who've worked the second-home market typically have some level of experience in facilitating buying, selling or management of properties for investment, development, retirement or personal use in resort, recreational and/or vacation destinations.

The agents are also often aligned with a network of like agents throughout the nation, especially in resort and vacation markets, and they've established a network of related professionals (property managers, general contractors, tax professionals and the like) second-home buyers may need to maintain and protect their investment.

Real estate writer Broderick Perkins, executive editor of San Jose-based DeadlineNews.Com, writes regularly for this newspaper.