What week do you own and when what weeks have you traded back into. I saw a recent e bay ad that included a special assessment. Does the resort have a pending assessment.?
Any insight on the maintenance fees and costs associated with owning here?
II sightings are not common either. Do you know if they ever sold every other year contracts? .
We own a week in May and have traded for Feb. or March weeks in Sxm and Aruba. Our maintenance fee for a studio is $700. For an internal trade you pay a $95 trading fee. You also pay $400 if you trade up in season, which is what our trade is, and $400 if you trade up in size, such as studio to 1 bedroom. ($800 to go from studio to 2 bedroom..although that's difficult because they have limited 2 bedrooms.). There is also an energy surcharge added at the resort and a resort fee. Can't remember the exact amount of those, but if you call the Divi headquarters in NC, they could tell you. We don't pay for an RCI membership, though, because we don't use our unit for RCI trades.
Divi has been working on renovating all its units and we paid a special assessment about 8 years ago when they redid the units in our building. Think I've heard that they are going to be working on building A now, but not positive about that...but it is possible that some units are being assessed for renovation now. The resort is probably in the best shape it's been during the nearly 20 years we've owned there. We bought just after the huge hurricane that damaged much of the resort and lots of properties on the island. Divi has been working over time rebuilding their restaurant buildings and renovating units.
About 10 years ago Divi did a big push to get owners to convert units to RCI points, mostly I'm sure because they were charging another big fee to do so! They were trying to sell this as an improved way to trade, in the same way that RCI was pushing points. We didn't buy in because we weren't doing RCI trading, but lots of people did. Points units had to reserve via RCI and could no longer do the internal trades.
Now Divi's latest is to announce that they've become an II resort, and they've just given us a free year's membership in II. But that just happened earlier this year, which is probably why there hasn't been mich inventory in II. I also assume that the many people who bought into RCIPoints are locked into that program unless they personally opt out and give up the fee they paid for it.
I don't know if they offer now or have offered every other year contracts. But there may be a few remaining "no mandatory fee" contracts around with a few years left to run, which are nice. In its early days Divi sold their contract with the feature that you didn't have to pay a maintenance fee if you opted not to use your unit that year. That worked fine until too many of their early owners got too old to travel every year but still held on to ther contracts. They owners didn't have to release the weeks very early and so Divi had a hard time renting them out. They no longer sell contracts like that but I occasionally see one for sale.
By the way, Divi is RTU, so you own a contract for a certain number of years; ours is 40 with the right to accelerate any of the last ten years early if we want.