Welcome to the nuthouse

So you’ve just purchased a timeshare. If you’re like a great many people in this position, your first thought is: How can I get rid of it?

This reaction actually might not come immediately; it might take weeks, months, or even years to develop. The premise of a timeshare is so alluring, that the disappointments can be hard to swallow. In that regard, it’s a lot like life itself.

Look inviting? Think again...

I work for a company that helps people get out of their timeshare agreements. We have a steady and ceaseless flow of clients, across a wide spectrum of socioeconomic statuses, all of them angry and/or abashed at being taken in by the hucksters that proliferate and profit in the timeshare sales industry.  

Prospective timeshare customers are generally lured to an initial presentation at a resort, with the promise of gifts (which usually turn out to be bogus or overstated) in exchange for agreeing to a tour and a short informational session. Most of our clients claim to have been completely taken by surprise when some such innocuous-sounding affair turned into a sales pitch.

A sales pitch it will be, nonetheless, and invariably an aggressive and relentless one. A favored stratagem is the tag-team approach, with one sales guy or gal giving way to another whenever the pigeons demur. “They wouldn’t take no for an answer,” is a constant refrain on our client questionnaires. After three or four hours of grilling worthy of NYPD Blue, the subjects often break down; it takes hardy souls to resist the mounting pressure and the promises of more and more perks and benefits – to sit tight until the storm subsides and they are allowed to escape with their lovely parting gifts and their pocketbooks intact.

After the deal is clinched, comes the signing of the papers. Most often, buyers and sellers alike are eager to get this over with quickly, though for different reasons – the new owners because they’re exhausted, hungry, thirsty, bewildered, and anxious to get on with their vacation; the timeshare agents because – well, because they don’t want their adversaries to read their contract too closely. If they were to, they might find that just about everything they’d been told over the course of their prolonged ordeal is contradicted by the written terms.

Like what? Let’s start with the notion – a major selling point in most salespeople’s arsenals – of the timeshare as an investment. Just about every timeshare company’s contract stipulates that the buyers have not been made the claim that the timeshare is in any way an investment, that they can make money through rentals and reselling, or that they are purchasing it for any other purpose than recreational. Yet the predominant theme of most timeshare presentations is: the timeshare as investment.

“They told me I could sell my timeshare for much more than what I paid for it, if I ever wanted to, but I see them on sale on eBay for pennies!” So goes a sad but common lament. Why are timeshares selling, not just for cents on the dollar, but actual cents? And should you buy one? I’ll tell you next time.