timeshare news

ESPN and NBC will combine to provide daily coverage for all four rounds of the US Open

Instead of that recliner in your living room, wouldn’t you like to watch the US Open from the gallery? So here your head’s up: the 2007 US Open site will be Oakmont, Pennsylvania; 2008 at Torrey Pines in La Jolla, California; 2009 at Bethpage State Park, Farmingdale, New York; 2010 at Pebble Beach, Pebble Beach, California; and 2011 will be at Congressional in Bethesda, Maryland.

Start planning. There are fabulous timeshare resorts in all of these locations, and with a little skillful exchanging, you could be off the couch and on the course when golfing history is made.

The first steel-frame skyscraper in San Francisco, the Chronicle Building will house 52 residential condo units and 49 fractionals.

The Ritz-Carlton Club, a timeshare division of the well-respected hotels, announced Monday that it has accepted “sales reservations” totalling $106 million USD for fractional condos in downtown San Francisco. The location is the former Chronicle building at 690 Market Street.

Originally built in 1889, the landmark piece of architectural history started life with a brick face and was famous for being the first steel-frame skyscraper in San Francisco. During the 1960s it was “modernized” with steel panels which covered its surface. But about a year ago, those shiny coverings were removed to reveal its intended classic exterior. Eight floors have been added as part of the extensive $90 million project to transform the building into fractionals, otherwise known as luxury timeshares.

Local preservationists are enthusiastic about the transformation of the former headquarters of the San Francisco Chronicle. The building has survived numerous earthquakes, including the devastating 1906 quake which leveled most of the city.

Welcome back, beautiful building!

And welcome home to those who will reside in the 52 residences and 49 fractionals. Currently there are 57 interested buyers for the fractionals, which start at $200,000 for a one-twelfth share of a unit, and there are 45 interested buyers for the traditional condos which range from $1.2 million to $5 million.

If you scheduled New York timeshare this week, you could be on the eighteenth green to see the winning putt at the 2006 US Open

This week the United States Golf Association returns to Winged Foot, hosting the US Open Golf Championship. For only the fifth time since 1929, the prestigious event will be contested on the challenging fairways and greens of the Mamaroneck, New York golf course. To give you an idea just how difficult a US Open at Winged Foot can be, only Fuzzy Zoeller in 1984, claimed his win with a total score below par—267 for four grueling rounds of golf.

So on Sunday afternoon, who will walk away with the trophy and the winner’s share of the 6.2 million dollar purse? It might be Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson. It might even be 52-year old Jay Haas, who only three weeks ago claimed his first major title at the Senior PGA Championship. And this year’s winner could even be long shot, 15-year old Tadd Fujikawa, (the second youngest qualifier in the event’s history) who claimed the lone entry spot at the sectional qualifier in Hawaii.

But in tiny Mamaroneck, New York, where every hotel and motel room has been sold-out for months in anticipation of this great golfing event, the real winners will be the timeshare owners who planned ahead and exchanged their weeks for New York timeshares.

Orlando’s bed tax is not an issue for timeshare owners or those who rent timeshare by-owner.

How did you feel when you helped pay for the expansion of the Convention Center in Orlando? And wasn’t that nice of you to underwrite the city bus system there and pay for all those television ads to attract more tourists to Central Florida?

Don’t remember doing that?

If you enjoyed an Orlando vacation and stayed in a hotel or motel room there, then you did donate to a number of city and county projects—in addition to the donation you made via state and county sales tax to the highways, school systems and community services enjoyed by Florida residents.

The Central Florida vacation area, like many other tourist destinations across the country, levies a tourist tax or bed tax on top of their state and local sales tax. Hotel and motel occupants must pay both taxes on every room night booked. And because this double taxation accounts for a minimum of 11 percent of every hotel bill, (more in some areas) it is no wonder travelers reel with sticker shock when they see their final bill.

But residents of The City Beautiful may soon have to find another way to build a new arena for the NBA’s Orlando Magic and a new community performing arts center. Despite the fact that tourism is up in central Florida—hotel occupancy is down. When industry experts went looking for someone to blame for the room night shortage, (because surely the tourists were not all sleeping in their cars) they found the culprit to be timeshare resorts!

According to Staff Writer, Tim Barker, of the Orlando Sentinel in 2001, 10 percent of all visitors to the area stayed in Orlando timeshares. By 2005, that number had increased to 15 percent. Because timeshare owners are actual property owners, they do pay a percentage of their unit’s annual property or real estate taxes. But they are not charged with bed tax or sales tax on timeshare nights because they are sleeping in a bed they actually own.

What’s more, most timeshare renters are not charged the bed tax, if they lease a timeshare property directly from the person who owns it. Until municipal governments figure out how to collect and enforce such an effort, they simply have no way to track or collect the bed tax on individual transactions that often take place online, outside the state of Florida, perhaps even outside the US. The only situation in which timeshare renters are likely to be hit by the bed tax is when they rent timeshare directly from the resort.

So if you are considering selling your Orlando timeshare, the good news is that the Orlando resale market gets stronger and stronger all the time. And if you’d like to hang on to your timeshare resort property and use it as a rental, that market looks equally solid, especially as hotel rates (and their additional taxes) creep upward, already up 9 percent in the first quarter of 2006 compared with 2005.

No wonder even highly