I’m an evidence based decision maker as well so I can respect your desire to perform due diligence on pricing. The timeshare sales vertical is one of a few remaining verticals that really try hard to take advantage of “caveat emptor” in the marketplace. Hence the wild pricing variances in play. The entire industry functions using high pressure sales tactics combined with misinformation and disinformation protocols that are designed to play on people’s emotions in order to sell timeshares based almost universally on what we affectionately call “perceived value” here on TUG. In other words - timeshares are worth what you think they are worth and nothing more. What the timeshares are actually worth as set by the market is almost nothing - the actual value is near zero - because modern points based timeshares aren’t real estate and are really just a way of financing the future value of a lifetime of vacations to today’s present value prices. Since your future vacations are worth nothing to anyone else - it’s worth almost nothing on the resale market. The entire industry counts on people not performing due diligence and catching these people off guard while on vacation, and employing misleading high pressure sales tactics to make a sale.
You are finding large discrepancies in pricing because the resale timeshare industry still on some level counts on using a “lesser version” of the same tactics. Let’s use an example. A newbie attends a timeshare presentation at a resort and somehow manages not to purchase directly from the timeshare developer. They start searching on the internet for comparative pricing. It’s no accident that many of the more expensive resale timeshare agencies show up first in the search results - like SMTN for example - because they pay handsomely for their website to show up as an Ad hit. If the person is looking at the SMTN price and comparing it to developer pricing - it’s going to provide a significant discount in comparison. If the person then contacts SMTN and stops their due diligence - SMTN can make a very profitable sale while still leading the buyer to think they are getting a “good deal” yes? If the buyer continues their due diligence, as you have obviously done, they will find listings on eBay that don’t line up with the resale pricing on sites like SMTN or the brokers associated with Wyndham.
As GH has said - the brokers associated with Wyndham do the same thing. They hope to make a sale to buyers who aren’t performing significant due diligence for an inflated resale price. In some cases Wyndham will recommend these third parties to a buyer who has zero interest in purchasing retail from the developer. The brokers make decent coin if they can convince an unsuspecting buyer to pay too much for a resale contract in the process. If not, as you found, the broker will discount it heavily behind the scenes to facilitate a quick sale on behalf of the seller - and in these cases almost universally Wyndham is the buyer. Wyndam then recycles the points into their developer timeshare points pool and the sales and marketing division sells those recovered points as retail developer points.
It can really make your head hurt and leave a bad taste in your mouth when you piece it all apart. It’s an industry ripe for regulatory reform to say the least. Kudos to you for doing your due diligence.
Q. What is Wyndham Certified Exit? A. Wyndham Certified Exit (formerly called Ovation) is Wyndham’s exit program. It used to be that your timeshare needed to be paid off to qualify. Now they have…
wyndhamexperts.org
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
. The one thing I would add from a previous post in this thread is the point of increasing maintenance fees. They are insidious. They make the use of the timeshare increasingly expensive over time and, likewise, make it more difficult to unload the timeshare as the years go by.