How It Works
How It Works
Our company started about six years ago just as a way for us to make extra income with our timeshare points to pay for things like essential oils for months. I didn't make a lot of commission.
Timeshare rental traditionally has been to pre-book a week at your resort and list on www.redweek.com or some other timeshare rental website www.tug2.net. This has worked well for many people and for many years. What I found is, it is a little more difficult to rent out points as you need to pre-book reservations, typically six months or more in advance, and there are different cancelation rules and website rules you need to follow in order to get them rented.
In talking with owners, many had extra points they weren’t going to use or that were going to use them for cruises and other options, which was not good value. I had some success previously renting out units on Airbnb and HomeAway, but with the new law changes and complexities of trying to rent out specific times, it became increasingly difficult. That’s where we came up with a system where we could offer people any dates they want at any of the timeshare resorts by using timeshare owners points.
This allowed us to list nearly any timeshare resort on any system in any size of room and to be able to rent the units out for less than the developers do online. The only downside is, most resorts rent their units out online for almost the same cost as you pay in maintenance fees, which doesn’t give us a huge spread for profit.
For example, you could go to marriott.com and book a 2bd condo online at the Marriott Grand Vista for $280 a night plus tax. If you book it with your timeshare, it will be 400 points a night and at $0.61 per point means you pay $244 per year in maintenance fees on that number of points. It is not always like that and sometimes you can get that same room for the same number of points when they are renting it for $500 per night, but a majority of the time it is not like that.
Now, different resort groups have better value propositions than others, but for the most part, most timeshare rooms can be rented besides peak times for close to what you pay in maintenance fees.
So our solution was to list all of the resorts within a developer group, such as Wyndham, Worldmark, Marriott, Westin, and Bluegreen for every day of the year for less than you could book online by utilizing timeshare owners points!
Renting your points through us is not the best way to make the best amount of money. However, it is a guaranteed way to get rid of your points and recoup your maintenance fees plus some in many cases. So, as long as your not looking to get rich or make a ton of money, you now have a guaranteed way to monetize your timeshare points when not in use and for more cash value, then your developer gives you for cruises and other things like airline tickets, tour packages, resort items and the like.
How the Program Works
Step 1: We agree to rent your points for a certain amount according to who you own with. You then sign the contract and give us your developer log in credentials
Step 2: We pay you the agreed upon amount upfront and then go to work renting out your points.
That’s it!
While it is quite possible that somebody could damage something when they check in they put their credit card down so if there’s damage is done to the room it’s charged to them not to you. Just like when you check in they are required to put their credit card down still even if they’re booked on your room. We done over 10,000 rentals and never had a problem, but I am sure and someway you could potential he be responsible buried deep in your paperwork if it ever went to court. If you’re extra worried about it we could take $50 out of each rental and buy you a damage policy to make you feel better but we do not believe it is necessary however it is up to you.
We will only send you the contract and pay you when we are ready for it. If those points don’t rent you will have already been paid so you wouldn’t need to worry about that. There are some instances where we don’t pay for them totally upfront such as if they expire within 60-90 days but we will notify you of that ahead of time.
We do our contracts on a year-by-year basis and you were never under any obligation to continue renting through us.
This is not financial advice and we are not accountants but typically the rule is you can rent up to 14 days of your second home tax free. We highly recommend you get a CPA to help you with your taxes as there are plenty of ways you shouldn’t have to pay any on a small amount of rentals. If we pay you out more than $20,000 we do need to 1099 you by law. One creative idea we tell people to do is setup a business by getting an LLC or just a business license for renting out their timeshares. Then it allows you to take a lot of tax deductions that are normally not available to you simply because you have a business setup.
You can take a home office deduction which is up to 20% of your mortgage or rent payment, phone, 20% of all utilities like water, power and gas. This single step alone could allow you to take $5-$20k+ in tax deductions plus allow you to write off the cost of your maintenance fees and depreciate what you paid for your timeshare in some cases. We recommend the book How to Lower Your Taxes by Sandy Botkin for the current year to ensure you stay within the IRS guidelines and always find a good CPA who deals with business owners and 10-99 employees. We highly recommend not to use major chains like H&R Block or the like as you will not get everything done you are looking for.
These tax deductions can then be applied to your Your regular work income and/or capital gains taxes. So if you have $150,000 household income and you’re in the 28% tax bracket approximately, you could take say 15,000 and tax deductions or more which would give you an actual cash value back of ~$4200 at tax refund time and it is all perfectly legal!
In order to get your points rented we do need access to your account as that is the only way to rent out your points if they are not transferable. There is only a couple of company’s that still have a procedure where you can transfer points from one owner to another, but most do not.
We input your login information into a special software where no one can see the login details but they can still access your account. We only let our managers do the login accounts to ensure safety for everyone and there isn’t really much information in your account besides contact information as most CC numbers are still blocked out. Because of the volume of business we do and the timeliness of the transactions with availability we cannot in most cases have you book the reservations and then send them to us.
If you are worried about us using your account that is fine we give you one opportunity to make the bookings yourself however you must be able to get the booking back to us within two hours of us texting you Monday through Friday 7 AM to 6 PM Eastern standard time at any time during the day. Then depending upon how many points you have you could have a myriad of transactions from 3 to 50 or more. Each transaction takes some time as you need to remove your email address, your phone number, make the booking and then forward the confirmation letter on to us. This can be extremely difficult for most people and if you missed the timeline even one time we will be forced to remove you from the program. We have tried this too many times with owners and unfortunately they just take way too long to get back to us and it affects our entire business. If you are willing to do that though then we most definitely we can have you make the transactions and forward them on to us. Also if there are any fees in addition such as housekeeping fees, guest name certificates and or taxes we will include that payment on top of whatever price we are paying you per point.
Many resorts have sales and marketing teams that contact owners before their reservation to try to book them on a timeshare presentation. When you’re renting two different people we just recommend that you tell them that your friend is staying or your guest and to just get them the best view they can. Ultimately they’re just trying to book them on a timeshare presentation so we recommend you don’t even need to answer the phone.
Option 1: Points rental-
We pay certain developers Different ways but for the most part once we send you the contract and we verify your login credentials to your developer we will send your payment before we start using the points. On some developers we pay you as we go every two weeks such as Marriott which is typically all of your points your getting paid on.
Option 2: Weeks rental/ Pre-booked reservations
Step1: We charge a $50 upfront non-refundable fee currently and then we take a 15% commission when and if the unit rents. This allows some owners to make more money if they want to pre-book special sold out times of the year such as New Year’s, Christmas, Fourth of July, resorts for special events and things of that nature. Once you pay the upfront fee we do a cost analysis and will send it to you within the week which will give you an idea of how much money you could potential make renting it.
Then once you approve the amount or tell us a different amount that you would like us to charge we list the booking on all the different sites. You then would make a note in your calendar or phone to make sure and cancel the reservation if it has not been rented by the last day you can cancel by. At that time you can make another reservation during a different time or cancel it in the points and then we can rent it out as points. We give a guarantee on being able to rent out the points we do not give a guarantee on pre-booked reservations or week rentals as they can be difficult to rent.
There is a chance so however you could make considerably more money than the average rental of your points depending upon which reservations you get and how much notice time you give us.
We do not recommend this option as it can be frustrating when it doesn’t rent and takes more of your time as well as more thought and planning.
Every time sure is different so we recommend you call your developer first to make sure it is available with your program for 95% of them it is perfectly fine to rent out your timeshare and is part of the benefits that you have. There are programs you cannot rent out that people think of as timeshares but they are not. These include : Vacation Clubs, RCI Points, II Points, Weeks of exchange through the exchange companies and some resorts that are sold as points only programs with no deeds.
In those instances if it is not allowed in the rules we would not be able to help you. It is not to say you cant rent them the ‘Friends’ and ‘Family’ on your own and still make money it is just we do not handle that as we stay with in our Stoic philosophy of doing everything with honesty and integrity and following the rules.
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