I have to assume it’s also pretty rentable, which I would guess makes it less of a burden for Wyndham to own, if they can cover their HOA fees.
In hindsight, given Wyndham is gaining another Williamsburg location via the announced Spinnaker acquisition, it makes at least some sense why PP was closed. I'm sure these recent acquisitions have been in the planning stages for some time now, likely starting sometime last year best estimate, though that is pure speculation on my part to be clear. Logically, the seller would not have wanted to sell their portfolio piecemeal, so the acquisition likely required Wyndham to take all resorts in the Spinnaker portfolio. Solution, close one of their three Williamsburg resorts, in this case, PP.
No argument here - I'm simply saying it's likely much easier to close a longstanding Wyndham portfolio resort, than to first acquire and subsequently spin down a newly acquired resort, regardless of the resort location and/or other issues. I've never been to KC so I cannot comment on condition - we'll have to at least drive over to it and check it out the next time we're in Williamsburg. That said, it appears KC is closer to Busch Gardens and Yorktown, which may be desirable for some folks.
The oldest phase at Kings Creek is only a few years newer than Kingsgate. I understand Kingsgate was built in 1990. Kings Creek in phases between 1997 and 2006. I've only been to Williamsburg one time, earlier this year, and stayed at Governor's Green. I wouldn't really put much difference in location between either of the three Club Wyndham properties. Kingsgate isn't that far from Governor's Green and Patriot's Place wasn't that far from either of those two. Perhaps Patriot's place was closer to Colonial Williamsburg and Patriot's Place and Kingsgate had a little easier access the main strip of restaurants. But it isn't anything I would consider significant. I suspect the main driver of closing Patriot's Place was age and picking one to close given they had three properties in an already overbuilt location like Williamsburg.
Wasn't much of the process and letters prepared in template form and mailed out by a third party service? Documents, agendas and communications certainly weren't written and drawn up by the individual HOA BOD members. Other than signing off on some things for governance and legal purposes, I would expect the individual BOD members had no meaningful involvement in the process.
The main issue with Williamsburg is that it is still a highly seasonal vacation destination. We were there back in March and it was very quiet. I don't know what the occupancy of Governor's Green was at the time, but there weren't a lot of cars in the parking lot except on the weekend days. They had one pool closed for the season.
So, unless Board members were licking stamps and stuffing envelopes, they weren't involved in the process?
My understanding is that K&L Gates is representing and managing the exit processes for all impacted resort HOAs - and apart from state specific legal aspects - I'm sure most of the process is templatized so to speak - hence the similarities we've seen in the documents. I've seen several of the letters from the impacted HOAs/resorts - and they all have a very similar format - if slightly different bullet point verbiages as one would expect given each resort exit has a few unique factors involved.
Yeah March is late winter/early spring, so it can still be pretty sparse in Williamsburg at that time. I actually prefer going off-season, even if it's a bit on the cool side - to avoid the crowds.
Just because something is in CWA doesn't mean that someone other than Wyndham is paying the MFs - any CWA points that aren't sold to someone else still have MFs associated and Wyndham has to pay those.
This is my biggest question - if the maintenance to keep a resort going longer than 40 years is impossible to make it work financially (which I still question given IDK houses, hotels, etc usually lasting much longer) then I can't tell if the plan for these large companies is to wind down all operations in the next ~20 years as the resorts all slowly age out, or if they'll come up with new resorts, or what? I can't imagine a bunch of these systems want to try and re-sell people after their owned resort is dropped. I suppose the trusts like CWA have less to worry about as they're not any particular resort, but while they can "absorb" 14 HOAs going away, we keep talking about others that seem similar - or others that will reach the age I'd guess somewhat soon. As we start getting into 2030s are there like 50 HOAs that would need to be shed? How many HOAs does Club Wyndham even have? How many locations can they lose before people start bailing as their shrinking locations stop working for them?
My point was that the BOD role, as implied in the post I was replying to, was overstated. The individual board members had little involvement and little control to try and stonewall the process. Their hand was forced by a majority owner requesting a special election with a predetermined outcome.
As someone else pointed out, 90% of the votes cast were for closing. That’s not the same as 90% of eligible votes.
I am referring to the post about how BOD members could produce ugliness and delay and why they needed them onboard. Also, I never saw a breakdown of the votes. How many Wyndham votes vs votes from individual owners. Was anything like that provided to owners? Do you have any info about that from OIRC? I pointed out in post #788 that owner participation in annual meetings and votes is already abysmal. Why would we expect more here?
As I understand, they only needed 50%+1 of the votes cast. We know that there were at least 50% of voting interests voted (Wyndham's share) plus however many owners. I know that at some of the properties, they provided information as to how much Wyndham owned. They also disclosed how many total votes were cast. The difficulty is finding that data in the mega thread to compile it in a meaningful way to determine the number of individual owner votes cast. My guess is that individual owner votes were dwarfed by Wyndham's voting interests.
Mathematically, it could have been 90% of 51% but that's not realistic if there were opposition. More likely, the majority of owners and certainly the majority of voting owners favored closure.
I am not saying that owners weren't in agreement with closing properties, just that their votes didn't matter. We also don't even know how many of them voted. So we can't say with certainty that the majority of them favored closure. It is likely the case, but we just don't know the split between Wyndham Votes and individual owner votes. The individual owner votes were probably a small number compared to overall votes cast at each special meeting. But in the end to still say Wyndham needed the BOD or individuals to be on board with the closure is simply not true. They didn't.
I think we can only say with conviction that 90% of at least 51% of eligible owners voted for closures. I would bet a good sample of people didn't vote one way or the other.
<raises hand> That was me. I wasn't suggesting it as a viable option for boards nor did I think it was particularly likely (because obviously it didn't happen) but if you happened to have a board that was, as a group, vehemently opposed to the closure and selling of their resort, there are surely actions they could have taken from the moment the idea was floated to them by Wyndham (which had to have been early in 2025) that could at least have gunked up the gears and potentially created bad publicity and ill will. I don't have the bylaws of any of the HOAs in front of me, but certainly they would have the power of communication, both to the owners in the HOA as well as to the public. When I was a member of a nonprofit board there were things the board was empowered to do on its own vs things that only the entire voting membership could do. Creative actions could make their point. But in the end, Wyndham still had the votes for the final outcome. It's just more pleasant to do it when everyone's on board from the start.
In some cases that data is actually noted in the OP tracker table - for example from BB or FB - however I don't believe we were given explicit data - which may or may not be available in the Omni filings given the resort HOA votes pre-dated the bankruptcy filings by design - however one would assume this data would be part of the bankruptcy filings as proof of validation from the HOA processes:
Sure. They could have made it hard and slowed it down. But as the majority owners, Wyndham could have also replaced the BOD (if the Orlando International bylaws that I read Sunday on my phone is understood and remembered correctly by me) to put in folks they wanted. So while yes, the BOD could have “gummed” things up, the inevitable end was coming, and Wyndham was directing the charge…which is fine by the way. I just think it’s disingenuous to say otherwise.
Actually, not to be the always contrarian, but we can’t hop off as we please. Wyndham generally controls that too.
You can stop making payments anytime you want.