Interesting Bonnet Creek Owners Update

[joestein]

I am not really intimate with the finances at National Harbour, but what I have seen many times in Co-op and Condo scene (and is mostly likely the same in TS), is that the reserve is not funded until the majority of the units are sold by the developer or sponsor.

Wyndham has to pay for the maintenance on the unsold units, so they probably prefer to keep their costs down. That is why the maintenance fees are so low on new TS.

When I used to working in the co-op/condo industry, I constantly had to ask boards to increase their reserve funding. Especially developments with smaller number of units. Usually boards of developments that took over control from the sponsor rarely had any reserves. Usually sponsor controlled boards were not receptive to funding reserves.

Joe

 

[Richelle]

Alrighty, here it is...8.57%.

From $4.24/k to $4.60/k.

Email was sent Sep. 14.

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I actually got a call back from someone at National Harbor. Apparently the biggest thing is the taxes. They said the county is wanting to raise the property taxes a great deal. They have an appeal on for that. Unfortunately by law, they couldn’t delay sending our the proposed budget. They said the appeal was supposed to be heard this month but the county pushed it back. He expects they will hear the appeal before the end of the year. He said they’ve done this before and usually win. He said if they win the appeal, they will put the excess tax money in the reserve fund and lower the maintenance fees next year. He also said they are already using the reserve fund to subsidize some of that capital deficit recovery and they don’t want to run the risk of underfunding it. So, long story short, we will have to deal with the 8.57% increase for this year and hope they win the appeal and reduce the maintenance fees next year.

Also, apparently only the HOA board votes on the budget.


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[Richelle]

All the chatter on TUG and the various Wyndham Facebook groups from owners bragging and sharing about loopholes and ways to beat the system eventually result in Wyndham making changes to the system to stop or at least make things much, much harder. Cancel and rebook was ended and now from what we're seeing reported about the PICs Wyndham is changing that too. Resorts that were accepted as PICs are no longer accepted. The number of points you now need to buy to enroll a PIC seems to have risen. Telesales is only selling CWA points when before it was possible to also buy deeded points from them. It certainly isn't in Wyndhams best interests to have owners continuing to build cheap VIP accounts with PICs thanks to what they learned in TUG and Facebook.

There are one or two other things I can think of that Wyndham has changed or stopped due to what they've learned from us.

Sandi Bo, wouldn't it be interesting to know how many more hundreds of millions of points owners are now using for their reservations with cancel and rebook gone? And how many of those owners bought more points to be able to book the same reservations they were accustomed to getting. I'm sure Wyndham has those numbers. I wasn't in a position to have that many of our points tied for that long to take advantage of cancel/rebook but I've met a whole lot of owners who did it. It wasn't just the owners Wyndham identified as mega renters by a long shot.

Wyndham monitors the threads and some Tuggers and Facebbok group members would do well to remember that.

Orlando has been saying that certain PICs are being rejected and it’s now 64,000 points to enroll. However, I spoke to a rep in Redmond and they said there was nothing being rejected and it’s still 49,000 points. I will say, when I asked Orlando about it, they said they were given bad info on the PICS being rejected. However, I heard from another owner who dealt with the same person later and were told PICs were being rejected and the levels increased. I won’t be recommending Orlando to anyone now. I don’t like the games being played over there.


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[wynBob]

That's funny because at a sales meeting a few months ago in Nashville I was told in no uncertain terms that my CWS points there will soon become worthless because everything is going to CWA.

As for the 8% increase in CWA, their MF's are the average of the MF's of their entire inventory so it's not believable to think they already have the information they need to calculate that. Of course they could just be giving you an estimate, but an estimate with no true information is not really an estimate it's just a made up number.

CWA points will never go away. It is a much easier mechanism for their inventory management group. It allows them to take back old legacy deeds and throw it into CWA for new sales (versus trying to sell one-off deeds for older resorts).

General rule of thumb - from someone who worked for Wyndham for years - if you hear that something is going away and that you need to act or else - they’re lying.

 

[wynBob]

Wyndham math plan and simple. What does everyone think the new Privilege program is about. Daze and confuse. Add more levels to sell more points. It all a brilliant marketing strategy. Same as CWA was to sell more points. Now If you own CWS they push CWA
Im sure marketing laughs how easy it is to hoodwink owners into believing what they say is true.

Wyndham math plan and simple. What does everyone think the new Privilege program is about. Daze and confuse. Add more levels to sell more points. It all a brilliant marketing strategy. Same as CWA was to sell more points. Now If you own CWS they push CWA
Im sure marketing laughs how easy it is to hoodwink owners into believing what they say is true.

Wyndham changes the rules to protect their bottom line. Make no mistake believing it is for anyone else's benefit is nonsense. As far as points audits, transfer of points, use year alignments or a negative points balance Wyndham does what benefits them. Anyone who believes otherwise is just a agent of Wyndham. IMHO

Program changes, such as new VIP levels, are always designed to create leverage for additional upgrade sales.

There may be corresponding owner benefits, but sales is the main driver.

A rare exception was when the company rolled out Club Pass. Surprisingly, there was no purchase requirement for enrollment.

 

[55plus]

Club Pass created its own revenue stream.

 

[55plus]

Club Pass created its own revenue stream.