Hubble Smith of the Las Vegas Review-Journal documents a trend you have to pledge to ignore if you want to write about real estate for a newspaper in Phoenix:

A new market segment of homeowners called "splitters," people who split time between two homes, are helping to fuel not only the home-building industry, but other industries as well, a survey from Florida-based WCI Communities found.

Splitters evolved from post-World War II migratory trends in the United States. How many places have they lived since birth? How many of their extended family still live in the same town?

These are among the 35 questions that were asked of 12,000 people in the survey, which required respondents to live east of the Mississippi River and be a homeowner. Of the 1,743 respondents, 408 qualified as splitters.

About 70 percent of splitters own a second home and 20 percent, identified as "super splitters," own three homes.

"Americans no longer expect to experience birth, life and death in the same city or town where they grew up, or even where their families currently live," WCI spokesman Kyle Reinson said.

He said the survey was commissioned to develop a better understanding of emerging American cultural and economic trends of second-home ownership.

A recent study from the National Association of Realtors projects a twofold increase in second homes by 2009, which would account for nearly 12 million homes by the end of the decade.