The DC industry has never been the model for financial stewardship. What will happen with UE will likely differ from what should happen if you actually focused on the long term economics.
As examples, one would normally think that given the debt some clubs have that their dues would be significantly higher than the dues at clubs with little or no leverage, but that is definitely not the case. You'd also think that if a defunct club member comes with no deposit, they would need to pay higher dues to offset the debt needed to buy houses with no deposit (although I acknowledge that for the time being, you could probably do leases and make it work). Furthermore, you'd think how can you offer a return of the member's deposit when you never had one to begin with. Seems to me that if you believe the promise of a future return of the deposit to be true, the monies would likely have to come from existing members or future members. Existing members who actually forked over deposits will not want to cover those that didn't make deposits to their club. And the club would be that much better off by actually getting to keep future deposits rather than having to redeem out folks who did not contribute a deposit to the club to begin with.
These types of crazy financial constructs (IMHO) are the norm in DC land. Nonetheless, the hey day of easy credit and investor interest in DCs is over with, so I'm not sure the result will be what we've seen in the past.
Given the Q rumor cited above, their non-equity structure, their wealthy investor, and the past offerings to defunct clubs and then to members of defunct clubs, I would say they're the most likely one to make an aggressive play for things. ER seems to be the most conservative among the non-equity clubs, has not shown a real interest in acquisitions (other than in their formative years), and doesn't need to grow in order to "scale," so I'd be surprised if they did anything of significance. Equity Estates doesn't appear to have the backing (at least from what we know) to make a play for a club the size of UE. Between the parent co. and private equity funds, A&K has the backing and would have the requisite interest in scaling quickly, but is way too conservative financially and vested in their financial and club model to do anything more than what they did with Lusso IMHO. Maybe they could get comfortable financially in picking up some of the pieces from a BR, but that's about it, again IMHO. With Marriott behind it, RC and the Marriott timeshare units would seem to be a perfect match and would have the backing, but they don't seem to be going in that direction given what they've done with their DC.
This is really all just speculation, and I guess we'll see what happens in the coming weeks. Good luck to UE members, and I hope this turns out well for them and the industry as a whole.
