It’s commonly known that most owners regret their timeshare purchase. This leads some to try canceling their contracts shortly after signing them. Others, who perhaps took a bit longer to realize their mistake, turn to the timeshare resale market to relieve them of their burden. Selling a timeshare, though, is a very different process than selling a vacation home.
Whereas a physical house or condominium could just be listed, appraised, and sold like any other comparable piece of real estate, timeshares are products of the concept of fractional ownership. While a timeshare may technically be a real estate product, trying to sell it like typical real estate is not often a successful strategy.
That doesn’t stop a number of unscrupulous companies from taking your money after convincing you that they will actually be able to sell your unit and obtain a good price for doing so. Many timeshare resale companies are brazen scams under investigation by law enforcement.
Others, like Sell My Timeshare Now, may not be as bad as those timeshare scams, but they are often not very effective either.
This article will take a look at timeshare owners who try to sell their units through sellmytimesharenow.com (or SMTN.com) and why they have so much trouble. We’ll also look at specific complaints about SMTN by people who have used it and found it wanting. Whether with the Better Business Bureau (BBB), Yelp, or elsewhere, the pattern is hard to miss.
Finally, this article will discuss a better option: a legal, ethical timeshare exit with Centerstone Group. Having timeshare exit professionals in your corner will help you to understand your options and choose one that is best for you.
It’s tough to overstate the difficulty of selling a timeshare. Real estate sale prices, whether for improved real estate like houses or bare land, are driven by comparable sales of similar types of sales. In order to determine the real estate’s value, an appraiser looks at those sales and reliably determines what the market will pay.
Timeshares can’t be appraised in the same way as other real estate. For one thing, the term “timeshare” can refer to many different types of units: fixed week/floating week, ownership/right to use, or actual unit/vacation club/points system. It’s nearly impossible to come up with a consistent value when so many products are in the mix.
The other problem with selling a timeshare is that most comparable sales you do find will be far too low. It’s not hard to get on eBay or Craigslist and find owners selling their timeshare units for pennies on the dollar. (Sometimes, the price can be as low as $1!)
These low prices come about because people simply can’t find buyers for their units. In other words, even if you get a timeshare for $1, it’s still not a very good deal. Timeshare rentals are often a better deal for people looking to use these units. And unlike owners, renters aren’t on the hook for thousands in assorted fees.
When you figure in the cost of annual maintenance fees, exchange company memberships, repairs, and other various fees, a timeshare costs so much money that selling for $1 can often look like a good alternative to cash-strapped owners.
Now, with that information in mind, take another look at Sell My Timeshare Now. This is a company that supposedly makes money off of selling timeshares — “real estate” products that are nearly impossible to sell at a profit.
The pricing tool at SMTN.com steadfastly refuses to acknowledge this reality and instead lists a number of factors that the company believes will influence a timeshare’s selling price, like ownership type, usage type, points allocation, and timeshare brand.
While these factors may make a negligible difference, the fact is that none of them hold a candle to the biggest problem: People don’t want to pay that much for a timeshare. One of the key tenets of real estate appraisal is that property is only worth what people will pay for it.
And timeshares score very low on four key elements of value:
In that context, many of the Sell My Timeshare Now reviews discussed below will make a lot more sense.
Sell My Timeshare Now is a company based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that trades on its timeshare listings. Here’s how it works: Owners come to SMTN and pay an upfront fee to list the property. SMTN generally lets owners decide how “aggressively” (low) they will set the purchase price, and lists it for sale on their website.
Even among the listings on the website, you will find a wide disparity in the prices of similar units, sometimes even within the same resort. Though you may not find $1 listings, you can find “deals,” like a $750 two-bedroom unit in Maui, Hawaii, with $1,600 in annual maintenance fees.
Of course, basic math will show you that’s not such a great deal. And that’s why SMTN is flooded with these kinds of timeshares. If they are not selling such aggressively priced timeshares, then how are they making money?
The Sell My Timeshare Now reviews give some insight. According to some reviewers, SMTN charges significant fees upfront (rather than charging sales fees on the backend through escrow), and then its customer care seems to become significantly worse. Some reviewers claim employees disappear behind a wall of voicemails, leaving clients with no word for days or even weeks while there is no progress on selling their timeshares.
It helps here to make a distinction between the reviews and the complaints. While the reviews themselves give a middling 3.78-out-of-5 rating, the complaints tell a more detailed story. With 132 complaints in the last three years, there are a wide variety of problems that come to light.
For instance, the BBB notes:
Many complaints repeat the scenario of delayed or non-existent communication after paying a fee. Other complaints have shown owners who gave a lot of thought to how to price their timeshares reasonably, only to get no real inquiries from buyers. Sometimes buyers express interest but then never close.
The bottom line from these reviews and complaints is that SMTN isn’t a company with some magic secret to selling timeshares. In truth, it’s little more than a glorified bulletin board dressed up as an online marketplace. It might look better than eBay or Craigslist, but it is subject to all of the same problems as those sites. And it costs a lot more money upfront.
If you really want to get rid of your timeshare, there’s a better way than trying to sell it on the internet. Centerstone Group is staffed with real estate professionals who have collectively spent decades in the timeshare business, so we know how it works. We also know that you have a lot more options available for a legal, ethical timeshare exit.
From contract rescissions to our proprietary pressure campaigns, we have a variety of techniques to use against timeshare companies reluctant to let go of their owners. Sometimes you might find that you need legal assistance to get out of your timeshare, and we can help with that too.
We work with attorneys and law firms all over the country, and we will negotiate a better legal fee rate than you’d get alone. And we’ll be there through the whole process to provide expert advice and a guiding hand. We can even help you with legal representation and processes in other countries, like Mexico.
Finally, we also handle transfers of ownership but in a way that Sell My Timeshare Now has trouble with: getting receivers for your unit. In other words, we will have someone else take control and responsibility over your timeshare while we are working to get it sold or otherwise transferred.
This process often gets a timeshare off your hands much faster than the less focused, wildly optimistic view you’ll find with Sell My Timeshare Now.
But don’t take our word for it. After you’re done reading the Sell My Timeshare Now reviews, take a look at our reviews. We are an A-rated business accredited by the BBB, with a long list of positive customer reviews to show for it. Give us the chance to see what we can do to help you get out of your own timeshare trap.
Sell My Timeshare Now might sound like a great solution. It would be nice if you could simply pair buyers and sellers of timeshares so that unhappy owners could just get out of their contracts. Unfortunately, the problems with timeshares make it very difficult to actually sell these things; that’s a big reason why timeshare resorts use such high-pressure sales presentations.
Timeshares are a complex problem in need of a strong solution. Centerstone Group’s entire business is finding and successfully implementing those solutions. Contact Centerstone Group today for a free consultation, and let us see what we can do for you.
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