Is it a coincidence Membership Magic and Beyond rolled out within the last year? Doesn’t it offer the ability to swap points for an annual pass?
Have a lot of extra points and concerned about commercial renting, swap your points with Disney.
I do think having the new swap options will help Disney take the sting out of any kind of crackdown for most casual but commercial renters. “Oh, you have an extra 200 points one year? You can bank them. You have 2 years you can’t travel? Swap them into a vacation package exchange (through us). You have 60 orphan points? You can buy a few more OTUP and now you’ve got a sorcerers pass or park tickets.” Obviously I would prefer it if the exchange values were 20-30% better, but unless you bought direct recently (which I have) I assume it’s still enough to cover your buy in and dues.
The narrative steering is becoming so obvious now that it’s laughable. The best thing everyone can do is to write to the DVC member services and encourage them to take the gloves off and show no mercy.
This is actually good advice for anyone— last year I told a guide I wasn’t going to buy more direct points because I already have two home resorts where it’s challenging to get reservations at popular times at 11 months, let alone 8months, and I don’t like that I’m at a disadvantage from commercial renters.
You know that part of the concern of potential timeshare buyers is the committment and future cost.
One of the big sales points is the flexibility that if you have a year you can’t go, it’s easy to rent your points that year.
Same with resale value. What has been the biggest con shared about investing in RIV…it’s resale value is not going to hold up.
I actually am now wondering if Disney is seeing RIV resale languish close to $100 and realizing they can still sell direct points around $200 and it’s giving them confidence to take on the commercial renters who have been propping up resale value.
When a commercial renter does it, they chop it up and rent out all those earlier dates. They are effectively taking that room completely off the market for members. Commercial renters might prevent a good 150-200 random members from staying in each desirable room over the course of a year. You get 3-4 commercial renters walking a room type and you're running out of options for a member to ever get into one. A member walking the room does not do that, as they release dates as they go along.
I do think commercial renters break up availability by cherry picking the easiest to rent nights, but I think they are also taking a bigger total chunk than many people here realize. A few big renters each have hundreds of nights a year at nearly impossible to get room categories. I’m baffled by the contradiction between the people here who tell individual members oh you’ll never be able to get that room anyway even if commercial renters drop out and then don’t bat and eye at a single commercial renter being able to secure 3 of that same “impossible to get” room type on the same night. Knocking them out will free up hundreds if not thousands of AKV value rooms…that’s a lot more rooms to go around (for AKV owners).
Interestingly
www.dvcresalemarket.com has posted an unusually high number of stripped contracts in the past 2 days. 21 out of 32 (65%) new listings are stripped or nearly stripped. The ratio of labeled stripped to current total listings is 78/477 (16%) as per
www.dvcforless.com.
For comparisons sake
www.fidelityrealestate.com has 5 stripped contracts out of 28 (18%) listed in the past 2 days. Currently fidelity has 80 contracts labeled stripped out of 260 total listings (30%).
Caveat: Label usages like "stripped" can vary even within brokerages.
I spent way too much time, looking at this last night and noticed that the most profitable rental resorts (AKV and BWV) are dumping at disproportionately high rates over the past 3 days.
Yes. I’ll never sell so why should I care about resale values?
I think each member has the right to prioritize their own use case and I’m sympathetic to owners who prefer to make changes that help owner-users now… but I also think that even a harsh crackdown will not drop resale prices more than 50% below where they are now.
I tend to agree that cancelling rental reservations may not be the first step but it's an arrow I am sure they're keeping in their quiver.
Again, Disney has a really unique situation where they are likely to communicate with renters before they show up. Telling people at the 59 day mark after they make dining reservations that their reservation gets canceled but they have the option to stay on property at [moderate/value resort with lots of availability at comparable prices or [deluxe resort at higher prices] would be less cruel to renters and also help them fill the least popular properties. They could even force them to book at specific resorts to avoid losing their ADRs.
My head just really can’t get around this that people don’t understand the concept of there’s X points sold and that number doesn’t change based on who’s booking the points.
Everyone still gonna want the cheap studio at that popular time.
No, other people have already explained many times up thread why the average owner user looks very different from the rental profit maximizer. The number of users in home priority booking windows hasn’t changed but the difficulty in securing home resort studios has gotten much much worse.
But in the end changes like this to our contract are not a a win.
They may not be a win for you (or possibly even me, I don’t own at BWV or AKV but I bet other resorts improve too) but it is a win for many many members. People need to consider their use case is not necessarily the only one.
I also heard a good theory online as to why Disney is now taking this seriously after 20 years. The theory is that it is now cheaper to rent points at any of the sold out resorts, then it is to buy a contract and pay maintenance. So now rentals are cutting into DVC sales.
This actually makes a ton of sense. I see people say all the time that you’d be crazy to buy BCV/BWV even resale let alone direct, because renting will cost about the same. Wouldn’t surprise me if the argument is also compelling for PVB and Aulani. Can see why Disney doesn’t want people getting used to cheap rentals (though I still think the primary reason is cannibalization of hotel room bookings).
Or… people are still going to pay a decent price for resale because the math per night to stay at a deluxe resort in WDW continues to work. Deluxe is a fraction of onsite rooms. How much further than say a 20% crash is possible when there are plenty of consumers in the wings to pick up the slack at that cost. Salvage values can only go down so much before it starts making the math work for a larger amount of people. Is there really any possibility this causes resale value to zero? It would take demand at WDW diving on its neck for that to happen.
I agree in general but think we could see a drop more than 30% in the strictest of crackdowns, at least for a while.
Personally I don’t feel like any of my rights have been taken away. I can still do an occasional rental if the need arises. We bought under the impression DVC is for personal use. It was never sold like Tupperware, actively encouraging to sell it to pay some of our own use. There needs to at least be some years where an owner is using all of their points (not selling any). If excess points were purchased with the sole intention of making extra money to subsidize WDW trips, that seems to be a grey area if the plan was never personally use them.
I completely agree except that I don’t think that last case is a grey area, it appears to be a case of people buying points solely for income.
If you could rent points annually way cheaper than buying, then why wouldn't you? Plus, you're not tied into the long-term contract and retain more flexibility.
Yes, and then combine that with the ease of renting vs the frustration of walking/waitlist/stalking. The incentives were increasingly unfavorable for buying resale, let alone direct.
