I would like to circle back to these points, as they are interesting and sorta got lost in the shuffle.
At what point does the market become saturated with available points, both resale and direct? If the current business model of DVC is to make the lion's share of profits from direct sales of new contracts, how many of those points can be reasonably sold in the next 19 years, and at what resorts?
I don’t know the answer.
As they can tightly control direct points, I don’t think they will ever hit a point of saturation where it’s an unsellable product. There will always be new families to sell too. Saturation of the resale market will also bring down direct prices but only to a degree — the re-sale product is “inferior” and many buyers don’t even know the resale market exists.
If there isn’t much demand for direct points, they just stop building new DVC. Part of Riviera or Poly tower could permanently be used for cash rooms.
But while Disney can tightly control direct point supply, no centralized force can control the re-sale supply. It constantly grows. It only shrinks when resorts expire. It can shrink a bit with ROFR buybacks, but those are typically turned around as new contracts, right back into the pool.
So I do believe resale hits saturation, I don’t know when. And don’t know how severe it will be.
One possibility — we could effectively see a divergence in the resale market over the next few years. The saturation point might be now, explaining recent decline in prices.
But then we can start to see a split in the near future:
As I said, the supply of resale points only gets reduced when contracts expire. But.. as we get closer to the expiration date, the demand for those contracts will drop. So the supply of “desirable” contracts may actually get smaller as those 2042 contracts become less and less desirable.
Not saying this will happen — but it’s entirely plausible that we hit a point where 2042 contracts start to drop quickly, while demand for 2060+ contracts jumps up.
That young family in 2015 who didn’t really care whether a contract was 27 years (kids will have their own kids when our contract expires) or 47 years (may be dead by the time contract expires)… a similar family may really care in 2025 when it’s a choice of 17 years (our contract will expire before our baby even graduates high school) and 37 years (will take the grandkids some day).