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Re: TimeShare by Owners (by R P.):

peterp151 wrote:

The bigest problem for owners is they provide a credit card over the phone without written agreement what they are paying for. Then they do not have evidence they were scammed. Others sign the contracts without reading and understanding the contracts they sign. All but one contract I've seen in the last 2 years builds loopholes for the scamming company allowing them to charge the owner for listing services without any true assurances of getting the unit sold. Same goes for the refunds.

And therein the problems with upfront fee resale companies. They tell the prospective client all kinds of lies including we have a (or several) buyers waiting in line to buy your timeshare or we can guarantee you that we will get an astronimical price for your timeshare (all lies) when in truth they have an obscure database of timeshares that nobody will see where they've scammed people of their credit card numbers for listings .... the upfront fee is all they want.

In all the years I've been reading timeshare forums on the internet I have never seen one verified case where an upfont fee company sold a timeshare .... their job is complete when they get that several hundred to thousand dollar upfront fee.

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Telling the difference between a scammer and a legitimate service can be difficult, if not impossible.

Any resale company asking for an upfront fee in the hundreds/thousands of dollars are all scams. If they were legitimate, they would take their fee after the sale not before. There is no way on God's green earth that I would fall for those scammer's lies and hand over my credit card to them for doing absolutely nothing, but those people will you tell anything to get that upfront fee.

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When in doubt, don't spend too much. But please do not call all companies charging up front fees scammers. SellMyTimeshareNow and VRBO charge fairly large fees and they are completely legitimate even if their sales people are a bit snakey!

One more time, if they ask for an upfront fee then they are scams, period, see my paragraph above. I don't know what VRBO charges for rental listings, but I always go to their site when looking for a vacation rental if I can't find a suitable timeshare rental. We have rented from VRBO several times in the past ..... as a matter of fact, we just returned from a vacation that we used VRBO for a rental ..... they are highly recommended by travelers and their site is very easy to navigate much like Redweek's timeshare sales and rentals site is.

I, and all other knowledgable timeshare consumer advocates, still recommmend that everyone stay away from upfront fee resale companies and we always will.