Well, it's easy? TS developers have all the legal contracts, the financing and all the inventory. Plus, some of the major companies like Hilton and Marriott have built into their contracts a little thing called Right of First Refusal. If you want to resell your unit, they reserve the right to review the sales contract and block that sale by purchasing the unit themselves, then reselling it through their sales department for a profit. More and more TS developers are using this to encourage people to buy through them and discourage resales.

As for us, we own 4. All four have been purchased from the developer. The first was just like JMT said. We were on vacation, we hadn't thought about it or researched it and, since we hadn't been taking regular vacations it sounded like a good way to "force" myself to plan timeoff. It worked but I could have bought that unit for a lot less. Try $5,000 rather than $18,900. Oh well, live and learn.

The next two were location and time specific. One is an Ocean Front unit in Palm Beach, FL. The developement was pretty new and there were very few units on the resale market and no Ocean Front 3 bedroom units in the season we wanted. Since it was post 9/11, they were slashing prices and offering some pretty good incentives to purchase. For buying we received a bonus week that we used to go to Scotland plus a 7 night Alaskan cruise in an outside cabin with Royal Caribbean.

The other was an 18th floor strip view room at Polo Towers. I've never seen one of these units on the resale market but then again, I haven't been searching for one. In our case, we bought preconstruction so there wasn't really even a developer inventory, let alone a resale inventory when we purchased. Because it was preconstruciton, we got a much better price for the unit.

The final unit we were just lazy I suppose. We purchased an every other year usage at the Hilton Grand Vacation Club LV Hilton. You don't see EOY resales through Hilton all that often. This year we upgraded with Hilton to an every year usage at the new Hilton on the north end of the strip. Again, no resales at this property yet AND Hilton exercises ROFR.

I feel that most are like JMT says. Vacationers that never really think about purchasing, get roped into a sales presentation, then end up buying before they know what hit 'em. Thus, you get a lot of unsatisfied owners and a lot of complaints about the industry.

Doug, Did you make first contact with the other three properties prior to leaving on vacation, such as an advertisement in the media or your own research? Or did you go just on a regular vacation and happen to run across a deal that you liked?

After purchasing our first unit, we decided that we wanted at least one more two bedroom lock off unit. With a lock off unit, you can lock a door from the one bedroom master suite and the second bedroom and use both at different times. This allows you to us two units to get a total of 4 weeks worth of vacation.

We started making phone calls from home to developers. Marriott has a great reputation for quality and they're own marketing department handles resales of it's members and reposesed units. Unfortunately, most of what they had was in Orlando and neither of us really cares for Orlando. The worry was what if something happened in the future and we couldn't trade. We also called Polo Towers, our first purchase, to see what they had to offer.

Polo Towers offered a good price on preconstruction units scheduled to be built the next year. They offered us an unit on the 18th floor with a strip view for $4,000 less than the first unit we purchased plus, now maintenance fee's until it was done and accomadation certificates with our exchange company to be used anywhere we wanted to go, other than Vegas until the unit was purchased. That was our second purchase.

The thrid purchase didn't start out as intentional. We used one of those accomadation certificates to exchange into a Marriott TS in Palm Beach, Fl. I had this habit of going on tours for the freebies. All the way there, Shelley made me promise NO MORE TOURS. She'd had enough of them.

We'd been there two days when she turned to me and told me, "I want to own a unit here." Well, I told her we'd go on the tour and if they offered a good enough deal, I'd buy. This was the December following 9/11. Developers were pretty skitish not knowing if the general pubic was going to still have an appatite for TS's.

Needless to say they did offer us a good deal. We ended up purchasing a 3 bedroom ocean front unit. We also were given an extra accomadation certificate to be used for an additional week with our exchange company and a certificate that could be used for a 7 night cruise with Royal Caribbean for an ocean view cabin. The certificate took us to Scotland and the cruise took us to Alaska.

The fourth purchase came after we took the TS tour at the LV Hilton. We had both read about Hilton's flexabilty with their point based reservation system and thought it would be something we were interested. Besides, we now had an odd number of TS weeks and an even number of children. After looking the program over but not liking the price, we were offered an every other year contract that was at a price we could afford. So once again, we purchased.

This year, we upgraded our every other year ownership with Hilton to an every year usage owenership at the new Hilton property on the strip. It's probabaly more than we really need but we like the property quite a bit and have had some issues with Polo Towers management of the property.

At this point, that will be it for us. I don't have any more vacation time to use even if I did find something else I liked. We're happy with the units and their locations and feel we have as much flexablity as one can hope for with timeshare units. One thing I do know, we've come to the point where we HATE staying in a hotel room. There's nothing like stretching out in a condo with all the amenities compared to being stuck in a room with a bed and a TV.