Timeshare Purchases: Are all timeshares worth $1.00 or less on the resale market?

I have done a couple of previous posts on purchasing timeshares on eBay and explained whether auctions offering timeshares for $1.00 are legitimate.  You can read about them here and here. 

The general consensus is that they are legitimate offers for timeshares but there are details that you need to read to make sure that all fees are disclosed and there are no surprises that could occur where there are outstanding loans, past due maintenance fees or other non-disclosed fees associated with the purchase. 

In writing those posts, I realized that I am consistently giving the message that timeshares are worthless.  While I do believe that a vast amount of timeshares are essentially worthless in terms of resale value, there are actually a lot of timeshares that retain and even arguably appreciate in value. 

Appreciation in timeshares is almost a complete fallacy but there are definitely times where you may purchase a week inexpensively and end up selling it for a profit.  These types of weeks do exist but you need to know what to look for or get lucky. 

My Lucky Week

As you may know, I own week 47 at the Hyatt Beach House in Key West, Florida,  I have never been to that resort and will likely never go.  When I purchased my first week in 2008, I paid $6500 for that week which was allocated 1300 points.  Compared to prices today, I paid an exorbitant amount but still don't regret it as I have received a lot of value throughout the years. 

Recently, Hyatt redid it exchange chart and week 47, instead of being allocated 1300 points, was reallocated 2000 points.  This provided me an almost immediate 50% in value for my week although I still am not sure whether I would be able to recoup my initial investment.  You can read about that here. 

However, this reallocation definitely increased the value of this week. 

Other Examples:

As I have shown in other examples, eBay is a good source to see how much timeshares are worth.  For this, instead of looking for $1.00 timeshares, I thought I would see how much the most expensive timeshares have sold for in the recent few weeks.  Here is the list of some recently sold auctions.  I think these prices will surprise some of you.

As you can see in the attached, most of the timeshares listed above sold for $8,000+ dollars.  While of few of them had only one bidder, many of them had multiple bids which indicates that there were multiple people willing to pay these prices.  

eBay is not a perfect market but I tend to view eBay as a very good indicator of the true market value of items.  

As you see, there are many different brands of timeshares listed above that commanded such prices.  There are Hiltons, Marriotts, Disney, Westins, and even Welk resorts (a timeshare only brand).  

Conclusion:

Most timeshares are worth a fraction of the developer pricing so buying resales is essential if you want maximize ownership.  The economics of timeshare ownership buying from the developer "may" still make sense but the math gets very fuzzy and few people will actually be able to recoup the initial investment.  

However, timeshares can still have value and as you can see from the above, they can have some real value associated with them.  Not all timeshares are equal so do you research on what you want and what the going market price is for such week or system. 

What did you pay for your timeshare?  Can you sell it for what you paid?