Faces from the Frontline: Secondary Market Scams 

 

Since its inception, ARDA has been well-known for tremendous advocacy efforts for the timeshare industry and consumers, stemming from ARDA’s foundation of legislative and regulatory procedures.

To provide even more consumer focus, the ARDA-Resort Owners’ Coalition (ARDA-ROC)—an alliance of more than 1.6 million timeshare owners, developers, and resort managers—works to advocate for public policy positions that protect the interests of individual timeshare owners, preserve the integrity of vacation products, and enhance the vacation purchase.

Unfortunately, wherever a market exists, deceptive or fraudulent activity can also be present. The same is true for the timeshare resale or secondary market – but our team is working endlessly to protect our owners.

ARDA and ARDA-ROC consistently work to ensure that the vacation ownership experience remains preserved and protected through robust advocacy efforts with state and federal governments, as well as providing industry education to the media, financial advisors, members, owners, other associations, and consumers across the globe. 

While ARDA and ARDA-ROC continuously work with legislative and regulatory agencies to protect against frauds and scams, it is important to remind our consumers to be equally as vigilant. This means researching any company in the secondary market and being on the lookout for these six red flags:  

1. Being contacted unsolicited by a company regarding the sale of your timeshare or the elimination of maintenance fees; 
2.  Receiving an offer that sounds too good to be true (it likely is); 
3. Getting asked to pay a large up-front fee for a future “service”; 
4.  Learning of any promises to modify or cancel your timeshare contractual obligations; 
5. Receiving any call or mailing offer to transfer your paid-off ownership to another party; and 
6. Receiving a call or letter from someone claiming to be a representative of ARDA or ARDA-ROC (ARDA and ARDA-ROC don’t contact owners unless first requested by the owner to do so; ARDA and ARDA-ROC do not perform any resale services).  

For more information on ARDA and ARDA-ROC efforts in resale legislation, owner protections and ways to stay vigilant against fraud, visit www.arda-roc.org.  

Introducing…Mark Wang 

Every two years, we have the unique opportunity to welcome a new ARDA chair, a leader with fresh perspective and guidance to the strategic direction of the Association and the core nature of our work.

Change brings so many components to it: expectation, excitement, a sense of adventure, questions and perhaps uncertainty. Developments Magazine sat down with our new ARDA Chair, Mark Wang, president & CEO of Hilton Grand Vacations, to get a sense of his vision and plans for these next two years.  Here are some of the key things discussed during that sit down:

Mark has been an entrepreneur from a young age, building companies and developing teams with this inspiring sense of the possible.  He spent 26 years in Hawaii selling vacations, stating, “I started several companies and helped struggling resorts succeed. I learned all aspects of this business—sales and marketing, management, finance and operations.”

He’s used these lessons from his past to rise to his current role where he leads over 8,000 exceptional team members for a company that is traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

As for what his top priorities are as Chairman, Mark says:

“There are three top objectives I want to focus on, especially in the first year. First and foremost, continue to support advocacy as the number-one core strength of ARDA. I’ve been involved with ARDA for almost 35 years, and at the state level in Hawaii I saw how strong ARDA could be, protecting both developers and owners. As a second priority, I see great opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region, so I want to explore how to bring best practices and perhaps our AIF research tools to strengthen that region for growth. And my final priority would be to address exit programs and public perception, which are often inter-connected. First, we should consider owners who enjoyed the product for many years but now have a need for a soft landing. We can also enhance the overall image of timeshare, which is currently being tarnished by the tremendous activity targeting owners to ‘get out of their timeshare.’ We know owners love our product, and we need to protect our owners and our industry’s reputation.”

Overall, Mark adds, he is grateful to Howard Nusbaum and the entire team at ARDA for this opportunity to collaborate on the goals and objectives outlined in ARDA’s Strategic Plan.

Here’s to ARDA’s new Chair and the success of our industry—the best is yet to come!

To learn more about Mark, read his full sit down in this month’s issue of Developments.