Modern-Day Timeshares
There is much greater understanding in the world today that timeshares are investments in future vacations, as opposed to real estate itself. Part of this understanding comes from developers' very real need to market themselves more honestly if they want to continue to find customers, and part of it comes from the fact that more and more people are researching timeshares on their own as an alternative to paying ever-rising hotel rates and vacation-house purchase prices.
The timeshare industry, according to one study, saw a 116 percent increase in sales between 2000 and 2005. Sales of timeshares in the United States during 2004 alone accounted for $7.9 billion — almost as much as the entire world spent on timeshare purchases just a few years earlier, in 2002. The more people want to buy something, the more they tend to research it. Such is the case with timeshares and the corresponding spread of truthful information about them.
FAST FACT
Even though timeshare sales in the United States brought in an estimated $7.9 billion in 2004 alone, industry experts say that less than 5 percent of Americans who earn enough money to purchase a timeshare have actually gone out and bought one.
It is true that some of the old timeshare sales practices remain, in particular the oft-lamented high-pressure sales presentation that tends to take place during a free vacation to the property being sold. You will read more about those “fly-buy” techniques in Chapter 8.)There are also new incarnations of that greasy-haired salesman of old, such as people known nowadays as a resort's off-premises contact. This term refers to anyone who tries to lure you into a resort's sales presentation with the promise of free meals, theater tickets, and the like. Think of the guy standing on the Las Vegas Strip handing out blackjack vouchers to anyone who will go listen to his buddy over at the “hot new resort in town” for an hour, and you get the picture. These people are paid to put bodies into the sales-presentation seats, not to make business connections between you, the qualified buyer, and a resort vacation package that may or may not be right for you.
Luckily, as with any industry, the reputable companies that focus on customer-oriented sales practices tend to stay in business far longer than the shady operations, and eventually, a few brand names come to dominate the playing field. This is beginning to happen more and more often with timeshare resorts themselves, and it has already happened with exchange companies — the firms that control the trading of timeshare units among unit owners worldwide.
