When we were on our honeymoon, we went to a timeshare pitch in Orlando to save some money on Disney tickets. I already had a fair bit of sales training, so I expected to be amused at the hard sell, and treated it like a sociological experiment to see what kind of tricks they would try to play on us.
We damned near bought one anyway. They’re very, very good at what they do.
For us, it started out with a very nice lady, very low pressure. She gave us a tour of the place (very nice! - a 5 star resort). Talked about her family during the walk, got us to like her. She didn’t come across as a fast talker or a hard case at all - just a nice person trying to sell real estate.
Then we went back onto the sales floor at sat at a table while she went over the details with us. A number of other couples were at other tables. While we were talking with her, occasionally another salesperson would stand up and announce, “Your attention please! I’m proud to announce that Joyce and David Koechner here are now the proud owners of Week 12, unit 17!”. And everyone would clap like we were oh so proud of them for making that fantastic decision. And of course, the implicit message is that these things are selling like hot-cakes, and if we didn’t act quickly we might lose our opportunity.
I was on to that trick immediately, and it was amusing. I was still a little perplexed by the soft sell and the nice lady. I expected a smooth operator. Anyway, she gave us options, offered better prices, and did her best. We kept saying no. Finally, a man came to the table, and started grilling her. How come she hadn’t closed the sale? What was wrong with her? She had the best units to offer, and everyone else was selling theirs…
I got the ploy. She was there to make us believe that A) she was honest, B), she was nice, and C) she had a family and needed the job. If that worked, great. If not, the big bad boss man would fire her, her family would starve, and it would be our fault. I’m sure the ‘nice lady’ and the ‘mean boss’ had drinks and laughs about it later on.
Anyway, after he left, she did her best to tell us that A) don’t worry, she’d be okay, and B) could she please have one more chance to make a deal with us? So another even better offer came along. We didn’t bite.
Phase 2 - another, nicer boss came along and excused the nice lady. He sat down and explained that he was a manager, and therefore authorized to make an even better deal for us. We got a harder pitch this time, complete with calculator, estimates of how much we’d ‘save’ by buying a timeshare, comparisons to other vacation costs (all slanted, but which sounded good at the time). We didn’t budge.
Phase 3 - They thanked us for our time, said it was a pleasure talking to us, and on our way out, would we mind terribly spending another ten minutes answering some questions? The story was that they had hired an outside consulting firm to evaluate their sales performance, and they were conducting exit interviews of people who didn’t buy to provide feedback to the salesmen.
This is the one that almost got us. It’s really a brilliant ploy - they know that a lot of the people coming in think they are smart, that they’re getting a bunch of freebies and are determined from the outset to just say no. So they make you think the sales pitch is over, you ran the gauntlet intact, etc. So now your guard is down. No one’s trying to sell you anything - answer a few questions, and you’re out the door.
Of course, the ‘outside consultants’ are just more sales people. And here’s why this is so effective: In sales, you are taught to find all the customer’s objections, and overcome them. If the customer can’t come up with any more objections to the purchase, he’ll buy. The problem is that the customer’s stated objections aren’t necessarily the real ones. They may tell you they don’t like the location, while the actual objection is that it’s too much money. Or they may tell you that it’s too much money, while the real objection is that they’d be embarassed to tell their friends that they bought a timeshare. Or whatever. In any event, people remain guarded, and it can be difficult to overcome an objection that you aren’t privy to.
Enter the ‘consultants’. They’ve got your guard down, and have you answering honestly. They specifically ask you what your real objections were - and you tell them. Anyway, so they sat us down and asked a bunch of innocuous questions to establish their ‘research’ bona fides. Then came the zinger - What was the real reason why you didn’t buy one of these timeshares? We said it was the fear of having a large monthly payment while we were just getting started. The ‘consultant’ said, “What kind of monthly payment would have worked for you?”
Alarm bells went off in my head, so I gave an intentionally low answer. I think it was something like 100 bucks a month. Says the salesman, “So, if they had offered you a place for $100/mo, you would have purchased?” Before I could kick my wife under the table, she said, “Oh yeah, for $100 per month, we would have bought one.”
Suddenly, the ‘consultant’ had an epiphane - “Hey! While I’ve been sitting here, I’m sure I heard someone mention they had a unit that was somewhere in that price range! Hang on a second.” And the guy walks away to talk with some people. He comes back with a contract, all filled out, $100/mo for a unit in Ft. Lauderdale. Since we were in Orlando, he’d also been ‘authorized’ to give us a free 2 day vacation in Ft Lauderdale to stay in the very unit we’d be purchasing, plus airfare and meals. And as a extra-special deal, they’d upgraded the status to be ‘5 star’ on the unit, meaning we could still trade every year for a unit right here in Orlando! Best of all worlds! (of course, he didn’t mention the trading fee).
All written up - all we had to do is sign. And while we’re looking at this, there’s a guy on the phone going, “Unit 3 is gone? Let me check… Hey Bob! That unit you just wrote up in Ft. Lauderdale - was it unit 3? No? Good. Because Unit 3 is gone.” He’s also doing this to other people - the message is that the clock is ticking, and we’d better make a decision fast, or we’ll lose the chance of a lifetime that this ‘consultant’ luckily found for us.
So now we had to backtrack again, except this time the guy is saying, 'Look, you SAID you would buy at $120. I found you one. They wrote up the paperwork. They’re even throwing in a free vacation! How can you say no? You SAID you would. Are you people who keep your word? I’m not even supposed to do this - I went out of my way to help you! At the very least, fly out there and look at the place. All you have to do is sign the contract, and you can take the free vacation. If you don’t like the place, you can cancel."
Anyway, we managed to back out, having ‘lied’ and ‘gone back on our word’, and having hurt the nice lady. In fact, we were pretty much scum for not buying a timeshare. Not that they said so in so many words, but the disappointment in us from all parties was palpable. We collected our lousy Disney bucks and got out of Dodge.
In the end, the ‘free breakfast and 2 hour seminar’ turned into a five hour ordeal in which we had to run a gauntlet to get out intact. I fully understood then how they could give away so much free stuff to get people to attend these things - their sales rate is amazingly high, and the profit they make from each unit is astounding.
They make a lot of noise about how you’re actually buying property - you OWN a beautiful condo in Florida! It’s an asset! Studies show that real estate is one of the best investments. Hell, your vacations could be FREE. But here’s the thing - the unit we were looking at was $8,000. For one week. That’s $416,000 they’ll collect on a condo that at the time (1991) was worth maybe $150,000. But that’s not all. The ‘condo fees’ were something like $80/mo. That’s $320/mo in condo fees they are collecting from the ‘owners’ which was about triple what a real condo would cost. Then there’s the annual ‘management’ fee, the fee for trading your condo for one in another location, and the overselling - a lot of people can’t make their one or two week slot, and the condo company reserves the right to rent out the condo during that period. My guess is that they probably oversell a good third of the weeks.
As for your ‘ownership’, if the timeshare reverts back to a condo, your $8000 just became $2,000. If that.
