Buy Timeshare

Vacationing in your backyard is just not as much fun as many “experts” promised us it could be. When the economy tanked a few years back, American families found themselves eliminating non-essential expenditures in any way they could. Vacations were dismissed as luxury items that people either couldn’t fit in their budgets or were told they shouldn’t try to fit in the family budget during such uncertain economic times. Well-meaning life advisers attempted to sell weary consumers on the idea that a staycation was actually a viable alternative to taking a real holiday.

But as The Priceline Group  announced in a press release last month, it’s now time to say, “R.I.P. staycation.” Whether the US economy is actually any better or not doesn’t matter. Hard working American families are tired of pretending that the inflatable pool in the back yard is a real vacation fun.

According to Priceline, 83 percent of Americans plan to take a real vacation this year. This is no less than double what the number has been in recent years. Says Brian Ek, of Priceline, “Staycations were popular between 2007 and 2010, when economic uncertainty had many Americans concerned about their finances and their jobs. But anyone who’s tried a staycation finds out very quickly that it’s not very relaxing. There isn’t that clean break with everyday responsibilities and activities, like checking in at the office and doing household chores. A vacation away from home lets people truly disconnect from the daily grind and recharge.”

Timeshare Resale Vacations Help Pull the Plug on the Staycation Concept

Family vacations don’t have to implode the family budget. Timeshare resales have always been an option. And the truth is, as the economy has struggled, the number of resales available at deeply discounted prices has increased.

This doesn’t mean that every owner selling a timeshare is giving it away, but it does mean that for some properties and some seasons, families who want to buy a timeshare have many properties from which to choose, all at competitive prices.

Vacationing is one of part of life that should never be on the “expendable” list. Taking a vacation is too important to our health and well-being, and adds too much to our productivity and clarity of decision-making, to dismiss its value in our lives.

The truth about timeshare offers to buy that are published on our website is as transparent as we know how to make it. Yet it still doesn’t always “click” with some people. On our SellMyTimeshareNOW.com website, we publish in real-time, the live feed of timeshare offers to buy as they come into our company. You can check these out for yourself at Up-to-Date Offers to Buy.

But before you follow this link, you need to know and understand what you are seeing. The page, which looks like the picture you see here, is a continually updating list of the offers that come into our company through our SellMyTimeshareNOW.com website. At any given moment, day or night, 24-7, you can view the activity generated on our website by offers being made either to buy timeshare or to rent timeshare.

The information is simple to follow. The left column of the chart shows the “AD#.” This is the ad or advertisement number assigned by Sell My Timeshare NOW to each timeshare unit, interval, or points we advertise, whether it is advertised to buy or advertised to rent.

The second column of information is the “RESORT NAME,” while the third column is called “TYPE OF OFFER.” The “TYPE OF OFFER” simply defines whether an offer is the bid (also called the offer) by a prospective buyer to buy a timeshare or it is a bid by a prospective renter to rent a timeshare. The last column on the right of the chart shows the “AMOUNT” which is the amount of the offer and the “TIME,” which is the hour of the day that the offer or bid was placed.

What’s Right (And You Might Not Understand) about the SellMyTimeshareNOW.com Offers to Buy Page

On our Offers to Buy timeshare page, you can see what dollar amount people are offering to purchase or to rent timeshares. Let’s be very fair. This list does not tell you the final price a timeshare owner accepts for the sale or rental of his or her timeshare. Because people ‘test the waters’ by presenting low-ball offers, you will see offer amounts that are simply too low, but that doesn’t mean that the buying and selling negotiations ended; in fact, a low-ball offer is often where negotiations begin.

Another aspect of the information that can’t be taken at face value is the fact that some prospective buyers begin their process to buy a timeshare by making offers on several properties, again in the process of testing the water to see which owners are negotiable on selling price or other terms of the sale or rental process.

But on the other hand, what’s so very RIGHT about this page is that the information here is as real as information can be. The SellMyTimeshareNOW.com offers to buy or rent page is live, real time, and unedited… and most importantly of all, it is proof that people do buy and rent timeshares every single day.

Yesterday we looked at 7 words with which consumers may not be familiar but that crop up when they  sell, rent, or buy a timeshare. Some of the words we defined are used in other industries or other types of real estate transactions. Others are specific only to timeshare and vacation ownership.

Here are a few more to add to the list:

• Biennial timeshare ownership: When you own timeshare use in alternate years (every other year), you own biennial ownership.
• Developer’s price: This is the full sale price when you buy a timeshare from a developer. It is marked up to include a percentage of marketing, advertising, and sales costs by the timeshare developer, including the cost of presenting to prospects who accept timeshare vacations or other “gifts”, attend a presentation, but never buy. In contrast, the price to buy a timeshare on the resale market is the true market value—the price consumers are willing to pay—without the mark up a timeshare developer adds to the sales price of a timeshare.
• Mini vac: Although this sounds like a tool for cleaning your car, it is actually an industry specific term used to describe the practice of gifting a prospect with a mini vacation in return for his or her attendance at a timeshare sales presentation. In reality, the cost of this gift is factored into the price of all timeshares a developer sells.
• Sinking fund: This is a portion of the timeshare management fee that is allocated to all portions of a timeshare property to ensure that the resort property maintains its “like new” condition throughout an owners period of ownership.
• Space bank or space banking: When you save or carry over the use of your timeshare from one year to another, you have space banked your timeshare. This typically applies to the practice of “depositing” the use of your timeshare with a timeshare exchange company, with intent to use a different (but comparable) timeshare at some date in the future. Space banking is not a guaranteed right of timeshare but varies by your terms of ownership, resort policy, and timeshare exchange company guidelines.
• Trading power: The value of your unit, interval, or points as a timeshare exchange is your “trading power.” This value may be set by the resort, but is in fact driven by demand for a specific resort, unit type, or season.
• Week 53: Approximately once every seven years, the days of the week fall in such a way as to create 53 weeks within a year. Week 53 is almost exclusively held by a resort for maintenance use; in fact, most timeshares are not sold in 52 weeks of ownership either, as time is necessary each year for repairs, renovation or refurbishing of each unit.

Hopefully, timeshare and vacation ownership as a whole is getting away from the practice of using language that is not commonly understood.  The more user friendly we can make timeshare, the more responsive the market and prospective market is likely to be.

Be sure to check yesterday’s The Timeshare Authority blog for Part I of 7 Terms Used When You Sell, Rent, or Buy a Timeshare. You’ll find more timeshare industry definitions on our Sell My Timeshare NOW website under the Timeshare Glossary.

Like most industries, timeshare and vacation ownership comes with its own industry-specific language. Too often, those who use these terms daily lose sight of the fact that others may not intuitively “speak their language,” when it comes to the terminology of timeshares. Here are definitions of a few of the words and phrases you may run into when you sell, rent, or buy a timeshare.

• Accelerated Use: Some resorts permit you to “accelerate” or speed up the way you use your timeshare. For example, you may own the right to vacation every year at a resort for a 20-year right-to-use period. If your resort, the terms of your contract, and availability permit, you may be able to use four weeks per year, every year for five years instead.
• Bonus Time: This is one of the great advantages of timeshare and one that too often goes unused. Through your resort (or through your timeshare exchange membership), you may have the option to rent additional weeks of timeshare use at discounted prices. In the case of Developer Bonus Weeks, you may even be able to purchase unsold developer owned timeshare intervals that may or may not be discounted, but will never be as competitively priced as the same week on the timeshare resale market.
• Check-In Date: Your check-in date is the assigned date and day of the week when your timeshare interval begins. Typically, timeshare check-in dates are Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. If you check-in later than your scheduled day, you are not extending your check out date beyond your original schedule.
• Escritura: This is a Spanish term for the registering of your timeshare “Deed of Title.” Never sign a contract to buy a timeshare if any of the terms of the contract appear in a language you do not fully understand.
• Escrow: Escrow is a safekeeping transfer of funds. Using a secured account, money to buy a timeshare or timeshare resale is held by a third-party until all transfer of documents is completed, assuring both the timeshare seller and the timeshare buyer that there is a secure transfer of property ownership and funds.
• Fee Simple: Describing deeded ownership, fee simple ownership means that the timeshare owner holds a deed in his or her name to a percentage of ownership (typically measured by intervals of one week) to a resort property.
• Lockout or Lock off Unit: Timeshare units are typically a studio unit, 1-, 2- or 3-bedroom (occasionally 4-bedroom) condo or villa, most with a living area, kitchen, and one or more bathrooms. But a lockout or lock off unit could be described as a “unit and a half”, meaning that it can be used as a whole unit or is purpose-designed to be used as two separate units.

Be sure to check tomorrow’s The Timeshare Authority blog for Part II of 7 Terms Used When You Sell, Rent, or Buy a Timeshare. You can also find more timeshare industry definitions on our Sell My Timeshare NOW website under the Timeshare Glossary.