Welcome to TUG! I see you've received the usual messages to rescind your purchase, which is always good advice if you aren't sure exactly what you want in a timeshare purchase. It sounds like you bought an OF 2 bedroom at the new WKORV-North property? Will you use it every year, or want to exchange it for Starpoints, or exchange within Starwood Vacation Network, or rent it, or bring friends? What are your plans for your week?
We purchased at the original WKORV, over the telephone. We hadn't seen the resort, but we were browsing the Internet and came across the resort about a month or so before it first opened. It was our first entry into timeshares. We had never even been to any presentation anywhere before. Westin Ka'anapali was everything we were looking for. Large, luxurious villas. Nice pool, fantastic beach, good service, etc. I couldn't find a resale since the resort was so new. But we found TUG, and I posted and read and researched for six weeks. All the advice was to rescind (even though we hadn't bought yet
) or to not buy it for the $45K sticker price for OV. We ended up purchasing from the developer anyhow, and received incentives that were worth about $7000 to us.
Many (if not all) here probably think we were/are crazy, but we followed the rule of buying where we wanted to go and have been very happy. Since we go to Maui every year, it made sense for us to buy exactly what we wanted. I will probably never exchange for Starpoints, but I would rent my week out if I couldn't use it. I would never trade with Interval because I would be better off doing a private exchange with an owner at another resort.
A week after our purchase, I saw the first WKROV resale at $38K. We still felt as if we made a good purchase. Fast forward four years later to today, and the claims are that an OV can be had for $30K or less. We've spent four weeks in our villa since we bought it, and know that we would have spent a lot of money every year to rent a comparable unit. So even though prices have gone down, the value we have received from our vacations has been excellent. I should mention that we did not finance our purchase through Starwood, but we did float it on 0% credit cards for four years.
You should probably figure out what you want to get out of your timeshare. Are the Starpoint incentives & conversion option important to you? Do you plan to visit Maui often? Do you have any interest in becoming an Elite owner?
We love the Westin Ka'anapali. The Starwood reservation system needs some help (I do not like waking up at the crack of dawn and hitting redial 10x & competing with speed dialers until the robot picks up and puts me on hold for 20 minutes, thus losing that precious timestamp, plus the agents have not been well trained in the past), but we really love the resort.
Good luck with your decision.
