In all seriousness, I apologize, I'm not honestly trying to come across as being confrontational, just for the sake of being confrontational, I'm just trying to propose an alternative point of view.
The problem is, the available evidence about how timeshare sales really work doesn't support your view.
Most people who buy timeshare do so having done almost no research before taking the tour. They are on vacation, having the time of their lives, and the sales tour gives them the opportunity to bottle that feeling, and keep it for years to come. The fact that there may be some impediments to resale just don't matter to them---they are not ever thinking of selling, they are thinking about how to bottle vacation magic.
What's more, those impediments are not even likely to come up during the tour, except in positive terms. ("If you buy direct, you get a free daily newspaper!") The one time they are guaranteed to come up: if the prospect asks why the resale price is so different, the sales staff will tell them all the reasons why buying from them is the only way to go.
These reasons don't even really need to be material---they just need to give the sense that you'd be missing out on something important if you don't buy direct. The psychology of a timeshare pitch is to convince the prospect to be an "owner", not just a lowly renter, so that you can recapture this feeling forever by pre-paying for it. So, implying that the secondary market is second class (even if, in reality, it isn't)---that it might not be as wonderful as this is---feeds into this psychology and helps tip a few more sales.
I will grant you that a rational, dispassionate customer would see through this and wonder what happens if they have to sell. But, the rational, dispassionate consumers are far outnumbered by those folks chasing pixie dust trails with a bottle in one hand, and a cork in the other! So, the theory is that losing a few rational customers is more than made up by closing even more of the "making vacation memories forever" prospects. That's particularly true because those rational customers tend to be less willing to buy in the first place---they are making a dollars-and-cents decision, not an emotional one.
Now, it's true that this is all speculation---I don't know for sure that the emotional buyers outnumber the dispassionate ones. But the evidence suggests that they do, because we know three things:
- Nearly every other developer has found some form of resale differentiation to be valuable to their business. In particular, all of the largest ones have---and that includes name brands like Starwood, Marriott, etc. Now, they could be all wrong, and these differentiators could be hurting their business, rather than helping it, but that seems unlikely, doesn't it?
- It is clear that other timeshare systems continue to sell at a healthy clip even though resale values are quite low---including those systems whose values drop by 90% by the time the rescission period ends, just a few days or weeks after pen hits paper.
- It is also clear that having at least the veneer of a differentiation between developer purchases and those on the secondary market is a useful arrow in the sales quiver. On other timeshare-oriented boards, we see those who have done some research and know the differences in price getting bamboozled by smoke-and-mirror differences that, in dollars-and-cents terms, really don't matter.
This last one is particularly interesting---even people who could be classified as "careful shoppers" get wrapped up in the
you would be missing out on important stuff narrative. So, if you add it all up, it seems to be more of a question of "when" and "what", not "if".
But, it is not all doom and gloom. For the most part, systems that have added differentiators after the fact have only nibbled around the edges, rather than created differences with real teeth. In general, this is because it is hard to make retroactive changes to the governing documents that only affect a subset of all ownerships. The ones that do have real teeth---the Marriott point system and the Diamond trust---were created with those resale restrictions in place from the very beginning. So, my completely uninformed guess is that whatever DVC comes up with in the way of differentiation, it too will be more bark than bite. That's okay for DVC, as we've seen that such differences are enough to sway people on the sales floor at other systems, and that's the only thing DVC really needs out of this. What's more, that's pretty good news for current owners, because the overall market tends to view these sorts of things for what they really are in dollars-and-cents terms. And, if that's "not much", then it won't harm resale values much vs. what we are already seeing with the growth of DVC: steadily increasing supply in the face of relatively static demand.
Exactly, there was a time where DVC would have cared about how a change would be received by the current membership. They now only care about how it affects future sales.
With all due respect, Sammie, I suspect that the only thing that has really changed is your perception of the system. I'd bet a mickeybar that they've only cared about future sales all along.
