Roger Barnard

Timeshares. My thoughts on them and the poeple involved in certain parts of the 'industry'

 

Timeshares – a sorry tale!!

Once upon a time there was a demand and a market for Timeshare holiday accommodation.. That was about 10-20 years ago and a lot of people bought into the dream of being a property owner somewhere exotic [all be it a small slice of the ownership].

Since then though, the world has moved on and now these Timeshare owners are struggling with the effects of the world recession and the opening up of the holiday markets the Internet has afforded people.
It does not help that some of the people selling timeshares were (and still are?) a bit artistic in their claims for the properties and that the real owners of said properties have continually hiked up the annual service charges.

Recently though there has been a trend for new companies to pop up that offer to help you sell your Timeshare. This is something that is actually quite hard to do. Search on e-bay and see how many there are being offered to little to nothing. This is done because the owners can’t afford to pay the annual maintenance fees any more. These  ‘helpful’  companies actually prey on the owners, taking them for a ride before ridding them of large sums of money.

Most of these companies are based in Spain... surprise, surprise, that makes them outside the UK laws so they can get away with it. They are milking timeshare owners of millions a year, on top of the millions the owners are already paying out for fees.

Take a simple example:-
One apartment in a block in Orlando, Florida. Annual fees at the moment are approx £500 for the 1 week for this one apartment.  Multiply this by this to include the other 51 weeks and you get £26,000 a year maintenance fees for ONE apartment!!!! If you estimate that there are 4 apartments on that floor and 8 floors to the block. That makes a massive £832,000 per year that the developers are making from the ‘owners’ of the apartment one complex in Orlando. These are just conservative values as well.. I think they are actually higher!!  I have heard of other resorts where the fees are a lot higher, some coming close to £2000 per year!!

No wonder then that developers are so keen to get people signed up!! They make a massive profit for doing very little, especially if the apartments are not used so cleaning and maintenance is kept to a minimum.
Now add to that the original cost of the purchase. In the above case it was $12,000 about 5 years ago. In the above example that makes a total of just short of $2m that the developer made for the original ‘sale’ of the apartments with the extra annual fees above still continuing to flow in... It must be nice being on the receiving end of all that.

The real problem is for the poor timeshare owner who decides that they want get rid of their apartment. How do you do it? The answer is “With great difficulty!!”  In the current economic climate, people are just not buying.
There are plenty of companies who offer to help you sell, a lot even promising that they have a buyer and you will get close to your original purchase price..and if you get a cold call from someone saying that, HANG UP!! They are lying!! They are just dangling the bait in front of you so you pay them up-front fees and once they a have them, they WILL vanish.

There are plenty of places out there that produce lists of these dodgy companies. It’s well worth checking them out if you EVER get a call from someone offering to help you sell your timeshare.

From personal experience, they can be VERY persuasive, saying all the things you want to hear and convincing you that they are doing the right thing for you... and I can tell you ,

THEY ARE LYING!!

All they want is your money, then they will vanish!!

I have a theory that there are a group of people in the Malaga area that are setting up companies, scamming people and moving on to the next company on a regular basis, they take the same list of timeshare owners with them as they move about and have identified the ones that are the soft targets. Most of these ‘soft’ targets are the older people who came from an era when you trusted people and because they get such convincing stories, they get sucked in to part with money they can usually ill afford to spare and are left dejected and upset while the scammers get rich!

I wish that there was some form of legal method to get back at these people but they conveniently hide in a foreign country where it is almost impossible to do anything.

The latest scam seems to be people offering to get you your money back from the original batch of scammers. They of course want money up front to handle the ‘case’.. How sick can these people really get?? They are probably the same people that conned you in the first place, just moved on to a new method of milking poor innocent people.

So, what do you do? I wish I had the answer to that one. In the situation above, there is little you can do. You can’t sell the property as no-one is buying. You could give it away, especially if you don’t mind giving someone a white elephant (that’s what they have turned out to be) or you can make the most of it and make sure that you actually USE the time slot you are paying for!!!

Keep your fingers crossed and hope that one day someone will get the laws changed to allow people to get out of their contracts in a way that does not hurt.

Just remember NEVER EVER pay someone in advance to help sell your timeshare. If you feel the need to give someone the money, send it to me instead. I won’t do anything about selling your timeshare, but at least I won’t lie to you about it and leave you feeling conned, ripped of and cheated.  Seriously… DO NOT pay these rip off merchants any more money.