[HPC Contract Talk] The HPC Maintenance Fee

[alameda94501]

This is part of a series of posts:

Click here for the Introduction Post
Click here for the HRC and HPC Inventory Post
Click here for the Request List, Wait List, and Reservations Post
Click here for the Annual Conversion Option Post
Click here for the Hyattizing and Developer Benefits Post
Click here for the Sales Tactics using the Reservation Site

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I will try to make this quick; as we peel back the information in the HPC Contracts Package for 2019, there are some questions that go beyond "sales weasels" to the heart of the HPC operation.

One relates to maintenance fees. The initial phase (cf: Tabular Description of Component Sites) of the HPC Portfolio was:

I looked at the Official Record (see this post) and this is more or less correct (there appear to be a few points mis-attributed to in the case of Pinon Pointe). One big point of confusion is that the Official Record reflects "Biennial Points" (e.g. a 1,300 pt week is counted at 2,600 HPC points on the Official Record as it counts Even and Odd weeks together).

With the addition of Wild Oak Ranch II, they added 1,964,350 HPC points (the normal Annual kind, not the Biennial kind, although the Official Record for Wild Oak Ranch II is the only record that confusingly records the Annual points instead of Biennial Points):

So if we believe this statement as 6,492,095 HPC Club Points (Annual, not Biennial), we then see this Budget:

I think the message here is "hey, our expenses went up 24.28% but we are only increasing your maintenance fee by 0.61%". But there are a few eye-popping notes here.

1. The top states: "Budget is based on 10,597,950 [HPC Points]". Whoa. That number over-inflates (?) the number of points for them to take maintenance fees for. They don't have enough inventory for 10,597,950 HPC Points (annual).

2. Looking at the "Component Site Common Expenses" (the maintenance fees they have to pay to the nine resorts) it is $8,614,139, which must include Wild Oak Ranch II - the addition.

3. They also have the 2018 Total Trust Expense, which if we back out their "Trust Administration Fee" would make the "Component Site Common Expenses" in 2018 for the "dregs" of HPC Inventory to be ~ $6,880,621.

That means that the Initial Phase cost per point is $6,880,621 / 4,514,865 = $1.523 per point.

I don't think that makes any sense, given that they cherry picked the nine resorts to be the cheap resorts. Is anyone paying close to $1.523 (and that's an average) per point in maintenance fees?

The change in fees in 2019, an additional $1,733,517 in maintenance fees for Wild Oak Ranch II over the additional 1,964,350 HPC points = $0.882 per point, which is high but more inline with their current $0.8373 per point.

There are a lot of implications on how viable the operation is, since they will never be able to issue 10 million points without incurring MORE component sites and maintenance fees. It can't be a simple typo - even if they made a mistake on the biennial vs annual points they still can only charge annual points as fees.

Does any HPC member have the 2018 version of this budget? How many HPC Points was it based off of? Please PM me!