| By :
Alison Withers
Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers The concept of buying a share of holiday apartment, lodge or villa in a resort, known as timeshare, is now more than 30 years old. The most common method is to purchase club membership but it's also possible to buy either a freehold, leasehold or licence shareholding to use the accommodation for an agreed number of weeks per year and for a fixed number of years. You will have to pay an annual maintenance fee once the initial purchase is made. Usually two weeks ineach year are set aside for maintenance when the accommodation is not available to timeshare owners. In conjunction with all the other share owners you will be a member of the home owners' association, usually set up by covenant to cover the buildings' continued management. The value of timeshare in providing holidays at a cheaper rate comes from the fact that the developer has no ongoing promotion costs. Effectively once the start-up costs have been covered the accommodation is self-catering and comes with guaranteed occupancy thanks to the time-share system, so that some of the savings can be passed on to the time-share members. Another benefit is that there are no reservation problems as there might be with a hotel and you can have guests or a couple of friends to stay. You can budget well in advance for your holiday and take advantage of deals on services like air fares and car hire. While the units are self-catering, meaning you are not tied to hotel meal times, there are usually on-site bars, restaurants and snack bars for times when you don't feel like cooking for yourself. The outcome will be a holiday at a level of luxury and with a freedom of movement you might otherwise not be able to afford. One of the disadvantages of the time share scheme may be that you don't want to holiday in the same place year after year. However, in the mid-1970s an international exchange scheme was set up allowing people to swap time and place whenever they feel the need. In the early days the industry developed a bad name partly due to over-zealous selling to hapless holiday-makers in European resorts and partly due to a number of over optimistic developers using their time share apartments as collateral for funding other projects. While much tighter regulation has been introduced since the early days it still makes sense to ensure that safeguards are built into the timeshare agreement to protect your investment against a downturn in sales or the financial reversal of the developer. It isn't a common problem, but there is a possibility that the developer's property could be taken over by the bank if there are cash flow problems, perhaps because the sale of units has been sluggish, and then the apartments could be rented out as longer term accommodation. However, once a few apartments have been sold as time-shares it can be difficult to change the nature of the project so that the more timeshares are sold the greater each owner's security becomes. On the whole, maintenance once all the units have been sold should not be a problem since it's controlled by the timeshare owners themselves control the management through their membership of the home owners' association. Thirty years later time share holiday schemes have matured, are much better regulated and increasingly popular, provided you have done your homework and checked not only that the resort is right for you, but also that the terms of the initial purchase agreement and protection against excessive increases in maintenance fees are robust and that the scheme is a member of a reputable time share trade association.
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