dmunsil
Disney Uber-Nerd
- Joined
- Jan 11, 2008
- Messages
- 1,456
OK, this is something I suggested doing, so I decided to give it a try. One thing that iluvthsgam pointed out is that rental prices have not moved much in many years, while dues and cash prices for room have done nothing but gone up (with some small exceptions here and there). He pointed out that David's charged $13 for more than 5 years before moving to $14 just recently. I wondered if you took a sample of prices on the DISBoards' rent/trade board if you'd see a trend.
The rent/trade board goes back to 2002, but it took some time before people really started using it, so I decided to start in 2003. I picked Feb 1 semi-arbitrarily. I worried that Jan 1 folks would still be on vacation, or not yet ready to face renting their points, but by February everyone would want to get their year's renting going. So starting 2/1 on each year I picked the first 12 prices listed for non-distressed points. I defined distressed as needing to be used within 2 months.
One interesting thing is that for a long time the bulk of the posts were "reservations wanted" rather than people posting that they had points. It seemed like a seller's market. Sometime around 3 years ago things switched so most of the posts are people offering points. I don't know what (if anything) that tells us about the market. Maybe there was a policy change on the boards that meant lots of people couldn't post their "points wanted" listings?
Anyway, the result was that there's a bit of a trend upward, but slowly and not continuously. Here's the raw data (I hope it fits on the page):
The last line is the average (mean). If we calculate the annualized rise from the first year to the last it's about 1.4% per year. If you go from the trough (2004) to the peak (2013) it's about 2% per year. And 2010 was a huge outlier. Not only were the prices lower, you could tell from the tone of the listings that people were having trouble; prices had been slashed and there were lots of points. If you calculate the trend from 2010 to today it's 5.7% per year.
Most of the recent rise was a big jump from last year to this year (7%). And the sample size is pretty small to draw any huge conclusions. But I've never let that stop me before.
You can tell from looking at the posts on the board that in the early days there were more people who wanted to rent than there were renters. That would tend to drive rental prices up. Later there were lots of people with points chasing business (like in 2010) Perhaps it's just too thin a market to be very efficient. I would expect that it's not going to move smoothly from year to year. But it's not entirely static. It pretty clearly moved up this last year. Maybe it's still finding its level.
My takeaway is that yes, rental prices go up over time. They may not go up at the same rate as dues or cash prices. But if they get too close to the dues prices or too far from the cash prices, there will be economic pressure to raise them. So I would expect that long term, they'll roughly track the rise of those two things.
Here's a chart, with a linear regression line.
The rent/trade board goes back to 2002, but it took some time before people really started using it, so I decided to start in 2003. I picked Feb 1 semi-arbitrarily. I worried that Jan 1 folks would still be on vacation, or not yet ready to face renting their points, but by February everyone would want to get their year's renting going. So starting 2/1 on each year I picked the first 12 prices listed for non-distressed points. I defined distressed as needing to be used within 2 months.
One interesting thing is that for a long time the bulk of the posts were "reservations wanted" rather than people posting that they had points. It seemed like a seller's market. Sometime around 3 years ago things switched so most of the posts are people offering points. I don't know what (if anything) that tells us about the market. Maybe there was a policy change on the boards that meant lots of people couldn't post their "points wanted" listings?
Anyway, the result was that there's a bit of a trend upward, but slowly and not continuously. Here's the raw data (I hope it fits on the page):
Code:
Rental analysis
Taking first 12 prices found on board starting on 2/1
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
$9.50 $10.00 $9.00 $10.00 $10.00 $10.00 $11.00 $10.00 $11.00 $11.00 $11.00
$10.00 $9.00 $9.50 $11.00 $11.00 $11.00 $10.00 $10.00 $12.00 $11.00 $12.00
$8.00 $9.85 $12.00 $10.00 $10.00 $11.00 $13.00 $11.00 $10.00 $10.00 $12.00
$10.00 $10.00 $10.00 $10.00 $8.00 $10.00 $11.00 $9.00 $11.00 $11.00 $12.00
$10.00 $10.00 $11.00 $10.00 $11.00 $11.00 $9.00 $9.00 $12.00 $11.00 $11.00
$10.00 $10.00 $11.00 $11.00 $11.00 $10.00 $11.00 $9.50 $10.00 $11.00 $11.00
$10.00 $9.00 $11.00 $10.00 $9.00 $10.00 $10.25 $11.00 $10.00 $10.00 $13.50
$11.00 $9.85 $9.50 $10.00 $10.00 $12.00 $10.50 $10.00 $10.00 $12.00 $12.00
$10.00 $10.00 $9.00 $12.00 $11.00 $11.00 $10.00 $10.00 $11.00 $10.00 $12.00
$12.00 $8.00 $10.00 $9.00 $10.00 $12.00 $10.00 $9.00 $10.00 $11.00 $11.00
$10.00 $10.00 $10.00 $10.00 $11.00 $10.00 $11.00 $9.00 $11.00 $11.00 $11.50
$10.00 $10.00 $11.00 $11.00 $12.00 $12.00 $9.75 $10.00 $11.00 $11.00 $10.00
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
$10.04 $9.64 $10.25 $10.33 $10.33 $10.83 $10.54 $9.79 $10.75 $10.83 $11.58The last line is the average (mean). If we calculate the annualized rise from the first year to the last it's about 1.4% per year. If you go from the trough (2004) to the peak (2013) it's about 2% per year. And 2010 was a huge outlier. Not only were the prices lower, you could tell from the tone of the listings that people were having trouble; prices had been slashed and there were lots of points. If you calculate the trend from 2010 to today it's 5.7% per year.
Most of the recent rise was a big jump from last year to this year (7%). And the sample size is pretty small to draw any huge conclusions. But I've never let that stop me before.
You can tell from looking at the posts on the board that in the early days there were more people who wanted to rent than there were renters. That would tend to drive rental prices up. Later there were lots of people with points chasing business (like in 2010) Perhaps it's just too thin a market to be very efficient. I would expect that it's not going to move smoothly from year to year. But it's not entirely static. It pretty clearly moved up this last year. Maybe it's still finding its level.
My takeaway is that yes, rental prices go up over time. They may not go up at the same rate as dues or cash prices. But if they get too close to the dues prices or too far from the cash prices, there will be economic pressure to raise them. So I would expect that long term, they'll roughly track the rise of those two things.
Here's a chart, with a linear regression line.
