Hard Truths About Disney Vacation Club | The DVC Show

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the dbc show coming to you from the bob varley studio in orlando florida i'm your host pete werner joined at the table this week by my good friends marissa valeton the director of sales and marketing hello hello for dvc resale market uh mr paul krieger senior editor of dvc fan and member relations supervisor for dvc rental so i was going to talk slower so you you had to do the wave longer slow motion it yeah um linda smith dbc sales associate with dvc resale market greetings thank you for having me realtor and co-owner of movingtorlando.com mr sean faulk hey everyone and our producer mr corey fiasco welcome home and this week we wanted to talk about um a couple of articles that have been written by one of our contributors on dbc fan dot com diane whiting and i'm trying to pull it up i just had it here and [Music] there it is there it is it was on safari not chrome that's why uh by diane whiting called uh hard truths about disney vacation club uh she did uh the first article back in april and uh she did another one a few weeks ago in october and we thought this might be a good a good topic to discuss i think yeah it really harkens to like all of the things that i think some of us wish we knew when we had first bought into disney vacation club some of the things we might have known when we bought in but maybe didn't listen to um so it just sort of gives a good perspective to maybe you know the new person trying to come into dvc for the first time or also some just some tips for the experienced owner as well so okay so let's start should we start with the first article or the second let's let's go back first one go back to the original let's go back to the original we'll have links to these in the show notes down below um so the first hard truth do we agree with this it's not a financial investment i i feel like history would disagree with this one see i i i'm inclined to agree with you i mean i i don't think you should go into it with the mindset of is this strictly a financial investment not the way you would a let's say an investment property like a you know something you're going to rent out um but yeah i i don't know though because i mean disney has right of first refusal still so i mean even if things crashed like around us like even i mean y'all if anyone was with were like were you doing um sales in like 2008 2009 or no but like did that tank things to a degree so i wasn't doing dvc sales at the time but i was working on the ships doing sales and so everything kind of paused i don't think it tanked linda you were there i was there i was there and i have to tell you that as a direct guide we were never allowed to tell a guest that this is an investment so the wordsmithing was very very important so it was always about this is an investment in your family's vacation future that's how we did that but i think and you've done this too probably last week i've probably talked to six or seven members looking to list and they've all said oh i've said to them you know i could never have told you that you're doing what's going to happen right now you're going to have a capital gain yeah i could never tell you that you're going to make money on this if you bought it like 10 years ago see i don't have the you know and i you know we don't have those restrictions where we can say anything anything i'm amazed i'm amazed how much the contracts i bought two years ago two years ago have appreciated mm-hmm you know i've just sold a couple and i mean i'm looking forward to those checks last couple years i think the market's gone up about 30 across the board so it's hard to look at that and go it's not an investment at all but i think to the point of like don't buy it for the purpose because ultimately right disney owns everything right so they're in charge they have final say so it's not like you buy a house where you own the land you own the home you rent it out however you want with disney there's certain like parameters set in terms of like if you're using it just for like if you're going out and buying 40 contracts i'm going to rent them and strip them and resell them you might get pan-slapped or caught for doing that so in like the big scheme of things no this probably isn't going to be like your side hustle for major investment but if you buy today and turn around and have to resell five years from now will you probably break even or have a decent profit i think it's like i think as long as you're using it for yourself like i wouldn't recommend buying it to rent the points out or anything like you're not gonna you're not gonna make money on that necessarily but if you're using it i mean you also have to factor in your those are vacations you would have had to pay cash to use so i'm like even for me i i know when i got milani when i went through and added up and i'm like literally like two or three trips and it's kind of paid for itself except without you know minusing out the dues every year but still i'm like um this is gonna pay for itself pretty fast so at that point anything else is is profit i go back to like it pays for itself in terms of the the room and the accommodations portion of this but you are like but becoming a member you are essentially committing to years of disney vacations which also comes with tickets air travel you know food all of that kind of stuff so um to that degree it's not like it's not necessarily a financial investment yeah i don't i don't think you should go into it looking at it as a financial investment but i think one of the legs that prop up the decision is that historically speaking this asset appreciates pretty well it's vacation insurance when you look at it that way yeah it's a guarantee that you can go when the economy because look what happens back in 0809 when the recession hit and a lot of people well guess who were the first people back the members of dvc coming back in because their room was paid for well it's a hedge against inflation totally because every every year the price of those hotel rooms goes up and up and up this can't this can't they can they can shuffle points around but if they add points to one night they got to take them away from somewhere else there's a fixed number of points every year they're allowed right uh to allocate um so it is a hedge against inflation so you know what i'm paying for you know five five what i buy now is still the same value five years from now even though the corresponding hotel room has probably gone up 30 40 percent at least with disney probably higher it's a nice segue though into the next hard truth though which does go up and up and up which are forever yeah dues are forever and always increasing yep but i think again in the scheme of things if you look at like a lot of traditional timeshare where disney maintains their values so well is that these are resorts it's not like the resort where you go hey there's this place in mexico and you're buying it and now the dues are more than the dues cost more than the actual cost of staying at that resort in mexico versus disney the dues yeah they go up traditionally about three to six percent each year but if you're referencing your dues in terms of the value of the hotel stay you're still usually always winning yeah that's a good that's a good way to look at it yeah we used to show slides on the ship you know when we did our presentations there in d-lounge remember it very well what the contemporary was when it first opened many many years ago and it just blew people away you could hear everybody go ah because today look at grand california what did they what was the price per point when they opened it was high 80s low 90s depending on the promotion so think about that anybody who's followed grant california think about that it was high 80s low 90s when it went on sale when did when when did it go on sale 2000 it was 2010. yeah 2009 2010 it was back then and i'll tell you what hindsight's always 20 20 right one should have bought should have bought like 10 50 point contracts because those contracts now go for what 300 a point it's crazy yeah yeah 300 a point on the resale market yes on the resale market it's it's it's that i mean and now you know we should mention that monera is now able to finance dvc properties outside of florida so if you want to finance hilton head if you want to finance grant california if you want to finance alani can help you with that now but you know i i look at that and i think that's why we're going to see the disneyland tower come in at a very high price point well even if you are going to use it yourself i mean i sell a lot of a lot of condo hotels in the area and most they the hoa per month average is about five hundred dollars a month and hoa dues and that does include all your utilities except electricity and then um you usually have about two to three hundred dollars of a furniture reserve that's held back every month out of your profits to revamp and all this stuff so that when they need to remodel and everything they have that so that's about seven or eight hundred dollars per month to to do that now of course you're renting that out and getting some making some money on it but as far as these go i mean if you're you know dues are a thousand to three thousand-ish dollars i would imagine by probably on three grand my guess would be the average per year that's still adding up to a lot less per month than it would be it's still a little under 300 a month and the yep of demand is there look at all the californians that have been waiting oh yeah waiting and waiting there's a waiting list yeah cause if coveted had to hit we'd probably see it built right no absolutely the next on the list there's no such thing as too much research um how many uh let's you know talk to people who sold dvc directly for disney um what percentage would you say of the people you sold were impulse decisions i mean i would i would say probably 80 of the people who joined joined on site it wasn't something where they went home thought about it and called back later 80 of the people who were gonna become a member did now had some of them heard about it and done some research yes but in the scheme of things i don't know i would say probably 60 percent were in the pixie dust loving disney so much and made that decision absolutely and you know the price point though of years ago because i go way back to 95. i'm just kind of angel here but you know dealing with that type of guest at a much much lower price point and then coming in right now because i think we'd all agree that research research reachers out there and i've even selling direct head times where i'd walk into a living room of saratoga and somebody's got their laptop open doing research so i think the guest right now is a lot more informed than they used to be well i also sold a lot on cruise ships cruises are different yep there's not much research you can do especially by the time when i was on the ship because i didn't work i was just on the ship three weeks ago and there's no chance in researching well you had them you had them right because that was great about the ships right i'm sure marissa would agree but you know you're on the fantasy they're not going to jump off you've got them for a week yeah so you know if they want to go back to their state room and think about it we often sent them back to do that because we knew we had them right they're going to come back a big majority of them for what bought on the ship love that but i do agree with this i think beca coming from the direct side even basic things like you share you don't have control over that as a direct guide you're selling whatever you share you're told that you can sell for that time period so or even home resort you're selling whatever that live inventory is so you're not necessarily giving the guests a full array of best options so i think research is key because if you're saying hey i love the boardwalk i only want to stay at the boardwalk well then if you're buying impulsively at riviera on a usher that makes no sense then it probably wasn't the best purchase where research would have done you a lot of good this will tell you it'll probably be sad uh this will tell you a fun night at the krieger house amy and i sat around one evening and went back through our old text messages and our old chats from when we first considered becoming dvc members and we thought we were like educated and all of that stuff and you just sit around and laugh and you're like i knew nothing back then accomplished those no for the right price maybe but but no like um i i agree and i disagree only from the standpoint of the person that i am if i do too much research i'm going to talk myself out of it that's like any scenario like a lot of the major like purchases in my life have always been impulsive to a degree because if i do think about it too much like i i will just consider all of the circumstances and become overwhelmed and just say nope not going to do it so all right next on the list this is absolutely true you will love it more than you i don't know if that's a hard truth but you will love it more than you think you will but what my thought process was when i bought my first contract versus what the experience was on the other side there's just no way i mean you can listen to people talk about it and the people that love it especially listen to them talk about it but the experience is so much better it really is it really is i love being a dvc member and as i said in a previous show that we just recorded i'm not a fan of dvc management i'm not a fan of disney management at the moment but i'm a fan of the product i'm a fan of the hotels i'm a fan of the experience and where i get pissed off with disney management is when they do stupid stuff that interferes with that i think that's what we all get pissed off about but so we get to be fans of our contracts that's what we're familiar with well i i'm you look i i i'm um wild about the cabins in copper creek um i'm wild about wilderness lodge um i love old key west i love aulani these are amazing experiences i love delaney before i was a dbc member yeah and i love the disney resorts before i was a dvc member and i had my favorites dbc did change that dvc did absolutely change which resorts i was really attached to um but i think that it does change your relationship with disney in a very positive very positive way that's my and the flexibility it's so unique in the fact that if you want to go and say hey is there a night available next month you have the option to do that you know or if you say i want to do something crazy and book maybe you're always booking a studio and you want to bank and borrow and book a two bedroom you can do that where a lot of time shares are so stiff in terms of this is your room this is what you get every year disney's just so great because it offers so many different options well and you know people ask me all the time you live here why do you own ddc i got to tell you dvc is a local is fantastic being able to just pop on the member the member services website look and see what's available oh hey you know what there's a one bedroom at copper creek available next week let me grab it and you go have a little staycation and you eat at geyser point and you eat over whispering canyon you just hang out at the resort you don't have to go near a theme park and i've done that i've done that multiple times and i i mean for me that's and we have you know with moving to orlando with our our real estate business uh we have a lot of dvc members oh yeah oh i bet you that are buying houses down here that have no intention of selling their contracts none none because you also it's your other guest bedroom because yeah i want to live in florida and i l i love my family but i don't want them staying with me here go stay in there animal kingdom well actually i have a lot of people who want are buying investment properties here in the area and then if they do have those last minute trips like they and if their own home is is blocked off that's fine but they don't want to block their house off for like christmas and thanksgiving and these holidays are going to bank them a lot of money but they still want to come for the holidays it's like they still want to come in these in the summer time and all that so they're like that's what my dvc is for like i'm using it in june because i don't want to block my house off for a week in june like i'm gonna that's a lot of wasted money so exactly yeah all right let's go over to the newer article you seer matters you wouldn't know anything about that shut up that just harkens me back to like some of the earliest shows we did where you know that that was disgusting i was told i was told stay with one use here i'm like [Laughter] now i've got like four and it's it's a juggling act it's a juggling act but i also you know again for me for me living here having the flexibility i have the kind of job that i have that allows me to go kind of do what i want when i want more or less um it's not as big a deal i think if i was living back in jersey and my time here was limited that would be stupid for me to have i think what four use years um i and i was told i was told stay with one use here and it's not that it's unmanageable it's just it takes a lot more work it's the potential pain in the ass yeah it really is i'll be honest even i i just have one and it's december and i so even now like it is weird to me that i've not gotten my 20 21 points yet like my i'm not in 2021 yet with with dvc and i'm like i don't like that but i also try to add up like i'm literally trying to okay what is seven months like what is seven months from december into the next thing so like what's my cutoff date so even that gets a little confusing for me it's staggered it's also important to remember that whether your points are available at this moment or not when you make going to make a reservation if your points will be available you can book the reservation that is that is the most common question that i think is out there i agree um and misconception you know think of points as the number of points that you will have when you check in when you walk in the doors to boardwalk or when you walk in the doors to wherever you're you're you're planning that vacation for the number of points that you'll have available on that day is what you have available to book with even if you're booking 11 months from that right so exactly because you know we hear people say oh you know i i want to go next january but i don't have the points well are you going to have the points next january well yeah okay well you can go ahead and book um that's all that matters like you said what how many points are you going to have the day you check in yeah the biggest misconception absolutely is that you sure oh linda mine you sure it's february so i've got a way to february 1st to book right absolutely not it's when the points fall in it's like a fiscal year that's the easiest way to explain it to a family it's your fiscal year when those points come you make that reservation like you said 11 versus seven keep it very simple that way now the big complexion is that if you've got multiple ushers and different names on a title now you've got from what we understand you've got multiple logins that i think becomes extremely hard for someone particularly somebody new so i try and keep somebody away from doing that sean like you said though even even to me december is the most it's the most confusing new year it's like commonly i'm like wait you don't have your 20 and then you pay your dues so far in advance at the end but i think another thing too is that 11-month seven-month booking window like i'll talk to a lot of people who say hey we always travel in may so i need a u-share that's june so that i can book my 11-month window which has nothing to do with when you're staying in may ideally for a may you sure or if it may vacation you want to usher february up until may you don't want to have your points after where you're stuck borrowing ahead so yeah definitely definitely is important yes all right next on the list resort availability is never guaranteed and that is the god's honest truth um that's the situation i'm in right now so i have points that i need to use for aulani and it's booked so and it's never booked but it's completely booked up and i cannot use them so it's very fresh i'm like oh like i waited like i was like i'm like i know i'm just like that's fine it's always available so like i waited and then i i'm not gonna get it so i mean like and that's the thing i could waitlist it but which i'm sure is what people go through that want to come to disney world and because i live here so i'm like it wouldn't be a problem to waitlist here i get it or i don't but for me i'm like i'm not going to book and plan to go to hawaii on a waitlist to like hope that it works out but i'm sure that's what other people think when they're coming here it's like but we can't book five people on a on a trip to disney and then not know if we have anywhere to stay and this was this was bad before but the the effects of the past 18 months have made it even worse in terms of availability like people have so many backlogged points that they're gonna that they're gonna lose um coming up um you know and and people are just booking anything and everything that's possibly available that's out there so it's um i don't see it going away either anytime soon um you know especially with us being in the 50th anniversary right now i think that the effects of you know what we've dealt with and the closure and all of that kind of stuff is gonna it's gonna reverberate the longest probably within dvc just because of the effects that it's having on the entire system and stuff like that so so you think you think the borrowing restrictions are going to go on for a while yeah i don't see my prediction in terms of the borrowing restrictions going away is going to correlate basically with the end of the 50th uh celebration so count back basically 11 months from whenever the 50th ends it might be we might see it happen like the middle of this year for bookings that are going to occur you know 11 months from now but even even saying that and seeing what availability is right now i i think we're going to be here for a while and remember we've been here before um i think doc reminded us on on one of our shows where we talked about you know borrowing restrictions when dvc first started the 50 borrowing role that was the rule um and then they and then they made it 100 for what all of us know as you know the the present day dvc so so you think it might be here here to stay it could it could very well be um which would surprise me only because it is a big selling factor it was always i mean you guys can probably talk to that it was always a big marketing factor for disney vacation club oh it was paul it was years ago many people bought in just because they wanted to get in with the idea hey i could bank and borrow so i think if disney keeps that as a rule in perpetuity it's going to cause a lot of negative out there because now you're forcing people to buy more points but if we go back to the financial trend forcing people to buy more points they like to do but it does hurt for those that can't well next on the list is a read the fine print uh discussing uh the borrowing uh the borrowing issues and and and how that's changed uh since uh since the pandemic so i think we kind of just covered that right yeah um i signed all my mortgage documents and my new home documents in about three minutes so i i didn't follow this one when i bought a house that's what i always tell people that they never do like i'll send people their like uh contract because everything's online i'll send it to him and literally like 30 seconds later it's like i get the alert that they signed it and i was like that was 19 pages like a half million dollar purchase like i'm glad i've read it and i know it so like i know i didn't mess you up but like with dvc you can't change it right so with real estate sometimes there's some negotiation where you can say like let me cross out that line or this closing date yeah you don't have control so you can read the fine print is it going to change anything no no by the way and let's be honest let's be honest most of us uh most of us on our dbc contracts the way we agree to uh terms and conditions on itunes yeah well it's this is probably a good time to mention that paul that's actually my house i turn to page seven and you'll see that and the last one on this list i think is probably the most important hard truth you need to accept in becoming a disney vacation club member and that is adonitis is real the struggle is real now if you don't know what i'm talking about it's this condition that seems to afflict most of us after we purchase we sit down and we think okay you know this is how i vacation i'm gonna need 200 points and you get your 200 points and you start using your 200 points and you're like oh no i don't have enough points and look wow that contract that contract looks really really good that contract looks really really good and you add on another con another contract you add on another one and another one i'm not speaking from personal experience you have no idea on this something three days later i've heard tell i've heard i've heard tell of of of the experience but i certainly certainly i was contacted by a pharmaceutical company recently they're trying to work through and and create a cure but it's it's very difficult and and again to give you an idea you know i decided i really could go ahead and get rid of some of my contracts i didn't need necessarily the points uh i had all of the points i had and two of them sold i think two or three other ones were were up there and then i saw a riviera for 144 a point i'm like okay now i have to i have though that's too good i got and then i'm like i i i emailed derek i said pull my other contract i'm not getting rid of my points um it really is a thing it really is a thing and it's a thing for a lot of it's fun it's fun i'm going to tell you something there's nothing more fun than finding another and like monero we talk about monera being the crack dealer they make it so easy they make it so easy if you're sitting there at three o'clock three o'clock in the morning you know three o'clock in the morning and yeah like oh that's a good-looking contract let me see you go to monery you fill out your stuff and like i said you know you fill out your application they should just like forego anything else and just have a screen that comes up with no other text other than the word yes confetti um with confetti i mean but and you know so adonitis without that is a real thing you add that in and then on itis is fatal um it's like a rash that doesn't hurt well i think selling even direct because if you've bought a contract direct for the most part disney has back dated points where ideally you're going to get points from six months previous or even a year previous so they kind of set it up that i think this is their strategy right so like if you're buying 200 points you start out with 400. so you don't get used to a 200-point membership you get used to a 400-point membership and then two years later you go wait all i know how to use is 400 points and i only have 200. adonitis yeah that was that was the experience with one of our our direct contracts we were actually staying at boardwalk and uh we were not owners there at the time had been looking but impatience got the best of us in terms of the resale market and so literally like called cod direct guide sort of said hey uh interested in 50 points at boardwalk said okay i'll have a van pick you up in 10 minutes and we'll get everything taken care of so it was a boom oh yeah like you said double points so it's it's it's not hard to do and if you knew how to go searching for the usher this goes way way back as a guide a direct guide you had a usher that was going to be the default you sure as they called it for that year everybody's going to go after that but we knew if you really really had the training we knew how to go searching to make that more attractive and so many times did that so you could get because not always on the default was it going to be renewed as quickly you know or the back dated but and that's what's so good about resale is when people come to us you know and they say well i'm thinking i want to get a direct contract but i want to buy resale we always say to them you might it's up to you do what's best for your family might want to get your resale contract first because these sellers have a usher attached to it whereas if you go to disney then they're going to need to match that but if you go to disney first then they're going to have a certain you sure they're going to sell and we may or may not have that match for you so up to you do what's best but that's been really really great for a lot of people it's uh yeah it's a it's it's it's a thing it's a thing the struggle is real so um thank you to diane whiting for those two awesome articles we'll have links to those uh in the show notes down below and thank you for joining us we hope you enjoyed it we'll see you again next week with another episode of the dvc show have a great week folks

Channel: DVC Fan

Views: 71,264

Keywords: Walt Disney world, Right of first refusal, DVC Show, THE DIS, Pete Werner, DVC Financing, DVC contracts, DVC resale, Hard truths about DVC, Disney vacation club, is DVC worth it?, is Disney vacation club worth it

Id: bM0-Chik-xc

Length: 31min 16sec (1876 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021