I would like to solicit some opinions if anyone is willing to weigh in...
We are already owners at WSJ, but potentially interested in purchasing a 3BR/3BA Virgin Grand Villas unit (mostly for personal usage). Considering the rapidly increasing pace of Maintenace Fees, what do you think a fair market value is generally to purchase one? The current decision is just to rent from another Owner vs purchase. Especially since so many Owners seem willing to rent for not much more than current MF. Some of the prices I see listed on Redweek appear to be divorced from (financial) reality.
I have a general idea of what I might be willing to pay, but I would be curious to hear from some here. I have broken it up into 2 categories. Platinum and Summer seasons.
Weeks 1-17, 51, 52 - ???
Weeks 24-32 - ???
Caveat is all the Abound drama creates a bunch of uncertainties but just speaking to the WSJ/Vistana system in expectations that will continue to operate fairly similarly:
The "Platinum" weeks come with more than twice as many SO and it looks like those weeks rent for more $$ and more regularly over MF. I would target those and be willing to put in $10-$15k on a purchase. Obviously it's frustrating that MF keep going up (+$1000 from 2020 to 2023 for 3BR), but still far under what you would have to pay to rent prime weeks. I can also still recoup MF value since I have 257,700 SO to play with - e.g., used SO last year to do multi-room family trip to HRA, got about $10-$12k value from that for sub $5k MF+taxes.
If you knew you wanted to travel in the summer to WSJ every year, you just have to weight the risks of the MF creeping up with the headache of renting (variable prices, availabilities, renters). I'd say you could make an argument for either but given the close proposition and the fact you don't have a large buffer of SO to recoup value, I wouldn't pay very much at all up front to take on those weeks.
Because the seasons are "off" at WSJ-VGV, it's actually a sweet spot for trading into with SO. You could buy a mandatory VSN resort with lower MF and use the points to get into WSJ (assuming that's still a thing post-Abound?). If you're a bit flexible and can book at 8 months, I've found summer availability pretty good.
At least for the 3BR, the Abound conversion value does NOT appear to be great. So I wouldn't worry about that too much. It would be extremely bad conversion in summer season.