Should You Pay to Sell Your Timeshare?

For some timeshare owners there comes a time when you just want someone to take your timeshare off your hands. You may have already tried to sell your timeshare through one or more channels, perhaps even paid a listing fee of several hundred dollars in advance with no results.

Capitalizing on the economic downturn and an already challenging marketplace for timeshare sellers, a niche market has emerged in the timeshare industry where companies are now offering to relieve you of your timeshare…for a fee.

The sales pitch works like this: you are invited to attend a short presentation about how you can get relief from your timeshare; guaranteed. The salesperson stresses the point that timeshares are a bad investment and the best thing to do is to sell the timeshare now. At the end of the presentation, you learn, that the offer is actually for you to pay the timeshare company a fee to give them your timeshare. Fees can be as high as $3495.

There are other alternatives to paying someone to take ownership of your timeshare. You can give away your timeshare for free to others who will enjoy it, sell your timeshare on an auction site, like eBay, list it on Craigslist or donate it to charity. In many cases, you can rent your unit to recover some or all of the maintenance fee costs. Your resort will likely have a bulletin board and newsletter for sales and/or rentals that you can use to advertise your unit.

There are plenty of timeshare users that use timeshares to travel around the world. These savvy timeshare users know not to pay the retail price from a developer and are often in need of additional weeks to purchase at prices they perceive to be great deals.