Rental: You can rent by using your points and making a reservation in another's name. You are supposed to inform MS when you call to make reservation that it is a rental. You cannot rent for a commercial purpose which includes a pattern of too much rental activity. Disney has set a rule that essentially says that if you make 20 reservations or more a year, there will be a rebuttable presumption that you are violating the commercial activity rule. Unless you are actually in the business of renting, you are unlikely to violate that rule. If you rent, you are supposed to inform renter of applicable resort rules and rental agreement should state rules are applicable to renter, and if it does not so state it will be deemed part of the agreement. If your renter does something wrong, like trash the room, you can be held responsible for the repair. If your renter does something like use a bogus or stolen credit card to make charges to the room, you can be responsible for paying the charges.
Transfers of points: another method owners use to "rent" is to just transfer points to another owner and get paid an agreed amount. This avoids some of the risks of rental using the method described above of making reservations in another's name. A transfer of points shifts any room related liabilities to the owner accepting the points who then makes his own reservation using them and there is no risk of the renter cancelling and leaving you with points you may not be able to use. You can transfer points only once per use year (in fact you can have points transfered to you once in a use year or you tansfer to another once, but you cannot do both in one use year). Note that the method described above where you rent by using your points to make a reservation is not in any way a "transfer" of points.
Though transfers are a common method of "renting," there exists some question whether the activity is allowed. The official documents deem your points to have no monetary value. Yes, you and everyone else believes they are the most valuable things in the world, but as a legal point they have no value. What does have value is the real estate interest you own in the property and points are legally just symbols that represent that ownership interest. In line with the legal point, the official documents expressly prohibit your tranfering points for monetary value. This rule seems designed to assure no one ever tries to claim against Disney that the points do have monetary value and to prevent owners from asserting Disney should have to pay for a transfer rental that went wrong because MS screws up the transfer. Moreover, the no transfer for monetary value rule appears to be one that can be overcome by careful wording in any agreement used to effect a transfer -- the contract could provide that owner agrees to rent that interest he has in the property for a given use year and the right to make a reservation, charges a fee for that rental of the real estate interest and then just agrees to do all things necessary to give the other party those rights including the transfer of the applicable number of points. That kind of agreement would thus give monetary value to the real estate interest and rights relating thereto but no actual monetary value to the points, thus possibly taking it out of the rule prohibiting transfers for value. In any event, it is an untested area and Disney generally does not go around challenging owners who transfer points and get paid to do so.
