Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Hello, Diamond...Are You Out There?

I'm all for timeshare developers to do something to their product to hold its value and differentiate "new" timeshare from "used" timeshare.

But it seems to me that if the story I heard about Diamond is true (Diamond, please contact me to confirm/deny/enlighten), this is NOT the way to go about it.

The story as I heard it was that Diamond was going to charge consumers who purchased their timeshare on the resale market up to $8,500 in order to use any of the benefits of Diamond.  Sure, this will effectively the Diamond resale market, but I have a nagging suspicion that it will stop anyone from buying Diamond on the primary market as well.

Can you imagine what would happen if Ford or GM came up with a policy that stated that they would charge $8,500 to anyone who bought a used Ford or GM in order for the car to be serviced by or with genuine products?  Insane.

Certainly we can do better, can't we?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Or since Ford cars have software in the car computer, what if you had to not use the software or the car if you bought it on the secondary market, since you don't own the software?

This kind of nonsense goes on all the time in the software world. If someone sells timeshares and effectively prevents there being a secondary market, I agree, for me that would prevent me from buying it at all, or for more than $50.

Any valuable asset has to have value. It's *impossible* to justify buying something that has no value.

Those timeshare companies should stop selling and start renting their products if they want to maintain control over it.

Of course this would preclude their selling $85,000 condos as 50 weeks at $15,000 a week.

Woo hoo! That's what's really going on, isn't it? They are selling an $85,000 condo for $750,000!

Wow, see the perspective you can get if you just do the math?