• What is the state of the industry in timeshare today?

Much of the timeshare sales for non-branded resorts (called ‘Legacy’) was done in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Thirty years later, these legacy resorts are faced with a growing need to ‘turnover’ those owners with new owners. Sometimes family is interested, but that doesn’t seem to be enough and an active and aggressive sales operation needs to be in place.

• Can sales be made?

Absolutely. A sister company of TOWB is TheMVPService; a licensed brokered company in 35 states. If you want to explore those options, let us know.
Sales are happening at legacy properties, but not at a fast enough pace to satisfy the loss of paying owners. Online platforms that do have robust resales (RedWeek) do most of the sales for ‘branded’ resorts rather than the Lagacy locations.

• What other options are there? We’ve tried sales already with limited success.

As time marches on, Legacy resorts find that they have less and less owners paying and carrying the burden of 100% of the operations.  Maintenance of the property (by neccessity because of lack of funds) starts to be deferred which leads to more unhappy owners which leads to less owners paying.  The cycle is fatal once a certain point is reached; and void of an influx of immediate sales in bulk – these properties are suffocating financially.  In the end – the choice is bankruptcy or some other organized termination/repurpose.

• What is repurpose anyway? Can it really work?

This termination/repurpose is one of the emerging trends in the industry, where an association makes a decision to ‘retire’ the timeshare, either the entire resort or partially – some of the units.  Owners can be moved to another location if they want to stay in timeshare and the cash generated from the sale of whole units (or buildings) after conversion is used to cover the wind-down expenses and pay distributions to owners.

• Termination or retirement sounds so harsh?

There are numerous reasons for needing to consider this retiring or repurposing (other than the obvious lack of ability to sell); most commonly one of or a combination of the following;

• The lack of a strong secondary market for Legacy properties.
• Fixed usage resorts that are more choice limiting than newer points based programs.
• Negative publicity regarding the industry in general.
• Scams.
• Resistance to rising fees by owners and boards.

• How can TOWB help with Repurpose?

TOWB LLC, owned by Joseph and Dana Takacs, is the premier firm in this space – having completed three successful termination/repurpose projects (in 3 different states) and actively involved in four others. TOWB has worked with thousands of owners already and growing.

The ‘termination/repurpose process’ is cumbersome, tedious, and expensive mostly due to the costs of the title work and foreclosures as well as maintaining the ongoing operations.

If you have questions or just want to opportunity to consider options in a healthy no-obligation environment, TOWB is for you.