Newbie buying experience (TS resale)

Okay, so I have only been a member here for a few short weeks. Great site and full of information. Going to take the plunge tomorrow on our first timeshare.

Over the past 10 years or so, we have stayed at a few of Marriotts timeshares as renters either through traditional method or as part of a presentation package (Grande Vista, Horizons, Surf Club). Always talked ourselves out of it due cost and with Marriot's low pressure, that has never been an issue.

The last two years we have stayed at Aruba Surf Club twice. Once on presentation package and this year on reward points. We love it and with the resale market at about 1/3 or presentation costs, we thought we would give it a chance.

Found listings from GMAC - Michelle Danoto. The listing that caught our eye was a 2 bedroom ocean side villa in gold season. Right To Use through 2060. Have done some research to here good and bad about GMAC and/or Michelle. My dealings in the pre-sale have been positive and she sounds sincere. After doing our research on the listing cost, the whole TS environment and all, we are going to take the plunge this week.

Tomorrow we submit our singed contracts along with our $1000 escrow (via credit card). We then await Marriott ROFR and hope that they follow current trends of letting all/most sales go through without a buy back.

For what it is worth to those in similar shoes to us, I will provide updates as we take this 2month +/- journey. At the end, hopefully we have our timeshare with no issues in the process and others have a good feel for what a newbie goes through and how GMAC and Michelle have done as our broker -good or bad, but hopefully outstanding!

More to come.

Ted

Dreaming of cold Balashi's in 2010!

Congratulations on your first purchase. I have not had any experience with GMAC. We owned years ago in New Hampshire and due to financial issues we had to give it back to the resort. Better days are now here for us. We have recently purchased 2 different resorts from E-Bay. Both of our new purchases are 2 bedroom/2baths. One is in Daytona Beach Florida (wk 6) and the other is in Williamsburg Virginia (wk 40). These are both deeded properties.