Timeshare Resales

Black Friday in the US has come to be recognized as the day after Thanksgiving; the day retailers put their earnings for the year “in the black”, and the day consumers save big, big, big on deeply discounted merchandise. While it is great for retail to have such a day, in timeshare resales, EVERY Day is Black Friday.

365 Black Fridays a Year for Timeshare Resales

Without unnecessary elaboration (because you have Christmas shopping to get to,) here’s how timeshare resales add up to 365 Black Fridays per year.

Timeshares are sold by developers, traditionally through tours that are often instigated and secured by the fact that the developer is willing to give gifts to those who attend the tours. Timeshare prospects accept the gifts, which typically take the form of discounted mini-vacations, free theme park tickets, or vouchers for restaurant dining.

All of these gifts come at a cost to the developer, as does the payment of salaries to the employees who conduct the tours and work, typically one-on-one, with prospective buyers. For every person who buys timeshare based on the gifts and timeshare tour, there are hundreds (thousands?) more who do not. The cost of all the gifts and targeted sales and marketing efforts that is incurred by going after consumers who do not buy, is absorbed in the mark-up on the timeshares purchased by those people who do buy.

Eventually, timeshare owners reach a point when they want to sell their timeshare and no longer be owners. When existing owners resell their timeshares, they don’t give gifts to every person who comes along, claiming to be interested in owning a timeshare. And they don’t pay a sales and marketing staff to promote their timeshares, through tours and other tactics. This is good news for buyers, because it means resellers do not need to mark up the selling price of their timeshare in order to cover an elaborate marketing strategy that falls short of creating a sale far more often than it succeeds.

Without the big mark up to cover sales costs, timeshare resales can be sold at market value… that’s the price most consumers are willing to pay to become a timeshare resale owner. The market value price of timeshare is typically at least 50 percent, and some times as much as 70 percent, below the original selling price of the unit, points, or interval.

Best of all, you don’t have to wait until the fourth Friday in November to buy a timeshare resale at a discounted price. You’ll find great deals in timeshare resales, today, and every day.

Over 43 million Americans are expected to travel this Thanksgiving holiday week, going 50 miles or more from their home. While this is only a .7 percent increase over Thanksgiving travel last year, it marks a gain in the number of travelers for each of the last four years. The last decline in Thanksgiving travel occurred in 2008, when the number of Americans traveling plummeted by 25 percent. Although travel is increasing, median spending for Thanksgiving travel is dropping by 10 percent from $498, compared to $554 last year, with timeshare resales and timeshare rentals offering one way for consumers to save money on travel.

Airfares according to AAA’s Leisure Travel Index are lower this Thanksgiving than they were only a year ago, dropping by 11 percent for lowest round-trip rates, which will average $188 for the top 40 US air routes. Projections show air travel will be down by 1.7 percent this year from last year.

Gasoline prices are holding steady with prices between $3.25-3.40 a gallon, which compares to the 2011 average price of $3.32, the highest price Americans have ever paid for fuel on a Thanksgiving weekend. Despite this, 39.1 million people will be on the roads this holiday, which is a .6 percent increase over last year.

And approximately 1.3 million travelers will travel by some means other than plane or car, including trains, buses, and boats. However, none of us will be going as far as in the past, as the average distance traveled shrinks to 588 miles from last year’s 706 miles, reflecting traveler’s attempts to trim their budgets.

Renting Timeshare Resales for Holiday Travel

For hotels rated as “Three Diamond lodging,” rates are down this year, but only by an average of 1 percent, compared to rates in 2011. For hotels with a AAA rating of “Two Diamonds,” rates are up this year, but the increase is also only 1 percent, at an average cost of $104 per night.

Renting timeshare from an inventory of timeshare resales, regardless of the holiday or season, remains one of the most affordable options for accommodations. Rates vary based on date, resort, and often, a timeshare owner’s degree of motivation to rent his or her timeshare. Yet timeshare rental savings for Thanksgiving travel and travel anytime throughout the year consistently reflect deep discounts and the desire of owners to rent timeshare they are not using themselves.

Typically, the closer you get to a timeshare unit’s scheduled used date, the more negotiable the rental rate becomes. Adding to the savings of timeshare resales and rentals, is the fact that their spaciousness and capacity to sleep even large families, means a dramatic savings as compared to the cost of renting multiple hotel rooms to accommodate all family members.

The following article looks at some of today’s challenges when it comes to marketing timeshares and timeshare resales. Much about the decision to sell your timeshare or to buy a timeshare  is  surprisingly similar to the decisions you make and the sales strategies behind the last cup of pumpkin latte you ordered. This article, “Why the future of timeshare marketing is not an either/or option,” was published in The Resort Trades, November 2012. It is republished here with their permission. 

Why the future of timeshare marketing is not an either/or option

When it comes to timeshare sales, resales and rentals, the secondary market and those who represent it, tend to be outspoken disciples of the power of Internet marketing. New York Times best-selling author Chris Anderson, in his book titled, “The Long Tail,” (© 2008, Hyperion) examines the power of the Internet, saying, “Now, in a new era of networked consumers and digital everything, the economics of … distribution are changing radically as the Internet absorbs each industry it touches, becoming store, theater, and broadcaster at a fraction of the traditional cost.”

Anderson’s message feels like a perfect fit when discussing timeshare sales and marketing. But is the Internet really absorbing every industry? Or are some companies and some types of products driven by the nature of their business to find ways to use the Internet to enhance the marketing they were already doing well? The successful Seattle-based coffeehouse Starbucks might be a perfect example of achieving an optimum marketing balance that incorporates the best of all strategies.

Getting the coffee into the cup

You can recharge your Starbucks card online. You can order the beans, buy the Starbucks branded K-cups, and probably, if it mattered to you, even get someone to write your name on a paper cup and ship it to you via FedEx. But the one thing you can’t do online at Starbucks is get someone to put a steaming hot cup of pumpkin spice latte (or any other favorite flavor) into your hands.

In a world in which Internet marketing and sales are claiming more and more territory every day, Starbucks, because of the type of product it sells, has no choice but to carve out a very different kind of space. Starbucks saw its role, identified its perfect place and then claimed it. Starbucks became your neighborhood coffee shop and in the process set the standard to which its competitors aspire.

Starbucks has taught an entire generation that the specialist serving coffee isn’t a clerk, server or sales associate; that person is a barista and when you go to your favorite Starbucks, the barista will know your name and remember how you like your coffee. As a company, Starbucks clearly has lived up to its corporate mission of inspiring and nurturing the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.

Achieving balance

Howard Schultz is the visionary who grew the Starbucks empire initially from a coffee bean sales store into the mega giant it is today, and later regrew it after the company’s rapid growth plan collided head-on with the faltering global economy of 2008 and the recessionary years that have followed. In his book, “Onward,” (© 2011 Rodale) Schultz writes, “I still remember what it was like when we started building the company. Every day we were fighting for survival, doing whatever we had to do. We rolled up our sleeves and left our egos at the door. Every small gesture mattered, and so much of what Starbucks achieved was because of partners and the culture they fostered.”

Many of the most successful names in timeshare and vacation ownership could tell a similar story. Good marketing and a powerful brand identity may have drawn owners, guests and prospective buyers to resorts initially, but over and over again it is the human touch – those critical small gestures made by the employees working on the front lines – that have been responsible for a resort’s survival and success.

Timeshare sales and rentals, are in many ways much like that steaming hot cup of coffee. A first taste is logically often required to initiate the relationship with the buyer. That first taste can come as a mini vacation or a site visit. But it can also happen during a hotel stay at a mixed use resort or a business trip to one of the resort’s other branded properties that may not include timeshare at all. A first taste for timesharing can even be gained vicariously through another timeshare owner so passionately sharing his or her enthusiasm for the product that the desire to own is contagiously caught rather than instigated by a sales professional. And yes, it can even be accomplished for many buyers via their online experience, a pattern that is now more prevalent in timeshare sales than the traditional resort tour.

The power of the Internet is the most pervasive, growing, and dynamic marketing medium ever conceived. Internet engagement enables businesses to permeate niche markets that previously could not have been sold to in a cost-effective way. In so doing, the Internet empowers businesses to effectively sell less of more and to do so in many cases by staggering proportions.

But niche marketing, as Chris Anderson explains, is not about replacing traditional ways of marketing, relationship building, and consumer engagement; instead it is about sharing the stage. Starbucks has more than 30 million “likes” on Facebook and offers a hub of Internet connectivity in every one of its storefront locations. Starbucks uses the part of Internet marketing, online sales, and social media engagement that works for its product and then capitalizes on the company’s unique proficiency to deliver the human touch in an impersonal ecommerce-driven world.

As an Internet marketing guy in the timeshare resales business, I understand the idea of selling less of more and find it extremely exciting. But I am also part of an industry that sells a product as appealing, as personal and as restorative to the soul, as is a fresh brewed cup of coffee. Through whatever ways we deliver the all-important small gesture and human touch, it is important to vacation ownership that those qualities are never lost. Timeshare sales and timeshare resales professionals must be the baristas of vacation ownership. When it comes to building and growing the next generation of timeshare, the answer is not either traditional marketing or Internet marketing; it’s all of the above delivered in the most personable and meaningful ways we can accomplish.

Whether you call it sensationalism, deceptive marketing, or an urban myth … here’s one that just won’t die: “You will never be able to resell your timeshare.” How do I know it is untrue? Because since Sell My Timeshare NOW began tracking offers in 2006* through our website, www.sellmytimesharenow.com we have generated more than $2.1 billion in offers to buy or rent timeshare resales advertised by owner.

As they say, ‘do the math.’ You will quickly realize that this number averages out to more than $1 million per day in offers to rent or buy timeshare.

Last week via our websites, we facilitated 1,765 offers to buy or rent. The value of these offers last week was over 4.7 million dollars. And the value of offers through our website year-to-date was $146,232,752. That is a lot of offers and a lot of money for a product that some people would like you to believe is impossible to resell.

Does every timeshare resell? No, and it would be deceptive to imply that it does. And timeshares do not resell for the same amount of money you paid for them; they are a product, like many other products, that depreciates in value, with some losing more value than others lose. But timeshares were never meant to be an investment and ‘experts’ who become indignant that timeshare owners have lost the value of their investments are trying to create an injustice where one doesn’t exist.

Timeshares are not an investment product, just as in the same way you never get a financial return for a hotel room for which you paid to vacation. You get the pleasure of the vacation, but your vacation stay doesn’t result in a financial return on your dollar. Like the car you buy, drive, and enjoy, timeshares depreciate. However that doesn’t mean they are unsalable; it only means you will not make money on timeshare resales.

Not only do timeshares depreciate, but some resell slower than others do. Yet there are often buyers, even for timeshares at less popular locations and less popular seasons. For the same reason you were attracted to buy your timeshare to begin with, there will likely be another buyer who values it as well.

*We’ve been selling timeshare advertising since our company was founded in 2003, but we did not initially track the number of offers to buy or rent timeshare, so we can only cite our results since 2006.