Part II of the Time Shares Series involves going to the time share presentations. When they get there they will ask many questions regarding what you do for a living, where you live, whether you own or rent, how many vacations a year you take, etc. They are trying to build rapport, and determine how likely you are of buying. Whatever the truth is, minimize the reality. For example, if your an employee of a company, let them know things are really hard. If you own a small business or company, inform them business is not do as well as before. You can get the idea. If you let them know things are going well, they will not give up on selling you something. They have a name for prospects that seem likely to buy. “A Cougar on a crippled Chicken”. Don’t be a crippled chicken. More importantly your 90 minute presentation has become 3 hours. Lastly, you get rid of your best reason for not buying, or getting a reduction in price. ” I can’t afford it.” Is the best excuse.
The first price they give you will be some inflated price. You can purchase the same timeshare, know as a “resale” for about a 75-90% discount. There is this great website called “Redweek.com” and you can see hundreds of timshares for sale. So do not buy at this initial presentation, unless they can match or come close to matching the prices on the resale websites. When I purchased my first week, I had been to the same property presentation before, so I knew what the price I could get the timeshare for. The original price was over $25,000.00, I ended up paying just over $5,500.00, but I got them to throw in an extra week at their resort, 3 days of golfing, a private lesson from a PGA pro(awesome), a private fishing trip, and a $800.00 credit on my meals and activities at the resort. The value of these incentives was almost $4000.00. In essence I got a timeshare for $1500, that I enjoy each year, and I only have to pay $550 in maintenance fees.
More to come on the structure of the time share.
