We live near Glacier National Park. Meadowlake Resort is a big timeshare area here. During the great recession, people were giving these weeks away for free. They were listed on eBay for $1.

We did go to a presentation in Panama City Beach a few years ago to see what one of these sales 'specials' were like. They wanted $100,000 per month for a timeshare at that time. Isn't that about $3,000 a day? That buys a lot of Holiday Inn rooms.

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Originally posted by mcrimm:
They wanted $100,000 per month for a timeshare at that time. Isn't that about $3,000 a day? That buys a lot of Holiday Inn rooms.

What?

Hard pass. Not a good investment and you get stuck with constantly rising fees.

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Originally posted by MelissaDallas:
It should tell you something that on every divorce case I worked on where a timeshare was owned, the couple fought over who got stuck with it instead of who got to keep it.

that's a good point.

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Every time they made a sale they rang a ships bell. It was going off pretty often mostly to foreign buyers. They welcomed new owners by announcing their name and were they were from when they rang the bell.

A lot of foreign money was buying a week near the mouse house.

Google Westgate Resorts and David Segal, multi billionaire founder of Westgate a mega time share company.

His home in Windermere, is dubbed the french palace coined the names for him and his wife as "The King and Queen of Versailles" somewhere close to 90,000 sq feet is the report.

They did a TV show on them, can't give him crap he went from a Garage start up to mega wealth, but it shows how much money is in timeshares, especially around Disney.

Link

This is his house, not one of his timeshare properties LOL


Now consider he gave his ex their old home down the road, a small 36,000 sq foot home on the Chain of Lakes in Windermere,




Time shares are quite lucrative, as long as you are one of the people selling them...

As good of a deal as a “reverse mortgage”.

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Time shares are quite lucrative, as long as you are one of the people selling them...

As bad as Ponzi schemes.

One of my wife siblings tried to give her a timeshare as one of our wedding gifts. She told them to pound sand.

We’ve had one since 2003 with Wyndham. My wife works the system and we get 2-3 vacations a year from the small points package we have. So far it’s been a net positive for us. My wife is very good at working their system.

They are a bad thing; but, they are a great thing when your friend owns one in Hawaii and they invite you to vacation with them.

^While not in the same league as Hawaii, we had friends that asked us to go to Disney World with them. The said they could get us a unit where they had a timeshare for $300 for 7 nights (about $43/night) and all we had to do was let them sit through a sales pitch. I offered to sit through the pitch, but they wanted to do it because they wanted some kind of upgrade.

My dad bought a timeshare in Clearwater Florida in the early 80's, and used it each year - or traded the week on an exchange to use somewhere else.

After he died my mom continued to use it, but due to "complaints about other properties" it was pulled from the exchange. More likely it was due to complaints about the actual property in Clearwater by people who traded weeks from somewhere else.

Maintenance fees kept increasing, and then they changed to rules to require payment of each year's fee on time, but without any billing notice or you forfeited the property. Of course my mom forgot to pay it on time one year and lost it. I remember thinking that the maintenance fee was about the same as what it would cost to rent a similar place or get a hotel room for a week. The forfeiture probably could have been contested in court but there is no way my mom could have managed a lawsuit and I figured it was good riddance.

If you think about it, the maintenance fee HAS to be about the same as a comparable rental or hotel. Why? Because all of the staffing, management, property taxes, maintenance and everything else has to be paid from the fee. And it's not like hotels are super high margin businesses. The primary difference is that a hotel pays rent to the land/building owner or expenses the depreciation if they own it. But rent/depreciation is not the majority of the total expenses, so by owning a timeshare you are only avoiding a percentage of the operating costs, the rest has to be paid in fees.

Time shares were just a way for developers to pay the cost of constructing a property very quickly, instead of over a long time. Once all weeks are sold, there is zero future revenue except the maintenance fees. And the place is almost guaranteed to age and fall into disrepair over a span of decades because there is no need to attract new customers. The use of high pressure sales tactics, long presentations to qualify for the free gifts, and the gifts themselves are necessary because the value proposition to the buyer is so bad, and the margins for the developer are so big.

Just rent a place or stay at a hotel when you want to travel. If you go someplace often, it might make sense to buy a condo and rent it out when you aren't using it.

My mother in law has one. It’s paid for but the fees go up every year. We have used it quite a bit. They have properties all over the planet. But I would never buy it and I told my wife to figure out how to not inherit it. Go online and search fro sale. There are thousands of them for sale for $1 each. When you literally can not give them away that’s a problem.