Brian Noble
Gratefully in Recovery
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2004
- Messages
- 17,969
There's a third reason: the resale market is horribly inefficient, in an economic sense. Not many potential purchasers understand it well, and that limits demand---selling into this small demand is a tar pit for any but the most valuable weeks.Not all timeshares drop like a rock. When the do, it's some combination of
- rules that make resales less valuable
- high pressure sales techniques that get people to pay a lot more than the timeshare is worth in the first place.
Timeshare is generally an impulse purchase---few people make deliberate decisions about purchasing, and almost no one does this for their first purchase. The average first-time purchaser also knows very little about resale, and even those who already own often have little or no idea that the resale market exists.
The spread between developer and resale prices seen in most current developments would largely disappear tomorrow if timeshare purchasers were a more educated lot. Note that that doesn't mean developer prices would collapse to resale---rather, they'd meet a lot closer to the middle. Developers wouldn't have to spend the enormous sums of money on marketing to get people to understand the product, reducing their costs. At the same time, larger exposure of the resale market to the buying public necessarily increases resale prices.
As to whether that ever happens...well, your guess is as good as mine. But, right now, we are living in a gilded age from the resale buyer's perspective. There is an enormous supply of high-quality intervals available for purchase, and there are more, not less, in the current economic climate. I wish I had the time to make use of more of them, but I've probably got one week too many.