Brian, can I ask why you chose Wyndham over Marriot?
Marriott has never really been on my radar.
My entree into timeshare was in the mid/late 2000s, and this was still several years before Marriott introduced their points product. Prior to that, it was primarily a floating weeks system; you bought and could book at a particular resort in a particular unit type/season. If you didn't want that in any particular year, the default was to deposit to Interval where Marriott had (and still has) internal preference and a protected period to exchange into other Marriott inventory. But those exchanges are one-for-one, and I wanted the benefits of a points system.
Even if Marriott's points system had existed, I probably would have passed. Marriott's quality carries a significant price premium in the secondary market, and I am not a luxury-at-all-costs person even now. I was even less so 15 years ago; at that point my partner's career was still getting established, and we were just getting out from under post-graduate loans that started out to be comparable to our mortgage payment. Most of the Wyndham resorts are not in Marriott's league, but the difference isn't
that stark from my perspective, and Wyndham is
significantly less expensive to buy and to own. I do love getting a good deal; more on that below.
Also,
"I'd say something in the low to mid 6s would be easily doable and a reasonable position for disposal later, so in the $1,450 neighborhood, maximum."
Is the mid 6s referencing the cost of the contract as in $6,500 and the $1,450 the annual MF?
No, "mid 6s" refers the cost in annual MF per thousand points owned. The per-(thousand)-point MF rates in Wyndham can vary
wildly depending on exactly what you own by more than a factor of two. $6.50 is probably about the weighted average---it's not great, but not horrible, and better than the blended trust product. The cost of resale Wyndham deeds is more or less inversely proportional to the annual $/K MF cost. The lowest-MF/K resorts (sub $5/K in '22) attract significant buyer attention, but it's hard to give away anything with MF/K too much higher than the blended trust (as mentioned, about $7.50/K), because blended-trust resales are plentiful.
I've not been paying attention to the market, but it looks like the blended-trust product is selling on ebay for about $5/K (so, the purchase price is less than one year's MFs). This is the ebb of the timeshare resales annual cycle, so it might drift upward from there some as we get into spring and summer. As in
DVC, larger contracts have lower per-point acquisition costs, smaller contracts can have more especially considering closing costs. One representative one is for 308K, which is the point value for a "standard" 3BR at Bonnet in peak season and a pretty good number to get started.
It closed at just about $4.50/K, all-in. Again, this is a higher annual-cost ownership than I'd personally buy, but it's not awful.
I backed into a few really good deals and got lucky, and ended up with a net acquisition cost below zero for my Wyndham ownership, which itself has annual fees significantly below average. I couldn't replicate that if I tried, so there's no point in hashing out the details.
