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There's very little doubt that Riviera will sell out, whether it takes 4 years or six years or 10 years and whether or not it has restrictions for one main reason... it's at WDW! OTOH, the nicest DVC resort (Aulani) may never sell out simply because it's not near a theme park.

Until all rooms have been declared, Disney simply rents out the non-declared rooms for cash. Depending on how long that takes, from a financial perspective it's like selling the contracts multiple times (cash room rentals and then DVC purchase) on some parts of the property. So ultimately, there's probably little reason to be overly concerned with the fate of Riviera.

Disney is unable to rent all of the Riviera rooms, and the amount they take in is much less than the sales of contracts. In addition, when the rooms are unoccupied for DVC, the maintenance is still paid for by the member dues. On the other hand, when the rooms are unoccupied without being declared, Disney gets to foot the maintenance bill. By selling DVC, Disney makes money and they limit their risk. The DVC owners bear most of the risk. Disney's exposure is limited to the amount of rooms they have not sold and point contracts they hold. If a DVC resort is sold out guess what? Vacant rooms? Not Disney's problem. Damaged structures? Not Disney's problem. Wage increases? Not Disney's problem.

Aside from the increased exposure that Disney has, Disney also had a problem with capital being tied up. If the resort sells out in 10 years, that's money Disney can't be using for something else. Even if they took the cash and stuck it in mutual funds, they will get at least 8% YoY return.

I'm sure this was particularly evident for Disney during the Covid shutdown. If Disney makes much more money off of non-DVC resorts than DVC resorts, they would've been building much more of them. Instead, Disney has been creating DVC, including converting non-DVC rooms to DVC rooms (e.g., Wilderness Lodge, Poly, etc.). The latter doesn't actually add many rooms to the inventory.
 
Disney is unable to rent all of the Riviera rooms, and the amount they take in is much less than the sales of contracts. In addition, when the rooms are unoccupied for DVC, the maintenance is still paid for by the member dues. On the other hand, when the rooms are unoccupied without being declared, Disney gets to foot the maintenance bill. By selling DVC, Disney makes money and they limit their risk. The DVC owners bear most of the risk. Disney's exposure is limited to the amount of rooms they have not sold and point contracts they hold. If a DVC resort is sold out guess what? Vacant rooms? Not Disney's problem. Damaged structures? Not Disney's problem. Wage increases? Not Disney's problem.

Aside from the increased exposure that Disney has, Disney also had a problem with capital being tied up. If the resort sells out in 10 years, that's money Disney can't be using for something else. Even if they took the cash and stuck it in mutual funds, they will get at least 8% YoY return.

I'm sure this was particularly evident for Disney during the Covid shutdown. If Disney makes much more money off of non-DVC resorts than DVC resorts, they would've been building much more of them. Instead, Disney has been creating DVC, including converting non-DVC rooms to DVC rooms (e.g., Wilderness Lodge, Poly, etc.). The latter doesn't actually add many rooms to the inventory.

Just remember that Disney is keeping resorts shut down due to low occupancy so having 65% of the rooms at RIV available for cash stays, it actual helps since they are not having costs at the other ones,

Even if they use RIV for moves and upgrades..which they have...and get less than normal price, it is still a win right now with fewer cash guests because it allows them to delay opening the other resorts.

So, IMO, that may play A role in them not worrying about sales foe the next few months.
 
Disney would be on the hook for the maintenance and repairs expense of undeclared rooms at Riviera, but they don't want to declare any more than they need to, since any declared rooms at RIV would be immediately reserved for DVC members, a Disney would get NOTHING from that, until they are sold.

So, I think by not selling them very fast, and leaving them undeclared, Disney gets the best of both worlds. They get the benefit of having expensive hotel rooms available to rent, while DVC pays the staff for the front desk, Security, food court and most of the maintenance. I certainly hope that DVC is not also paying for house keeping for the 'rental' portion. I'm not sure how Disney handles housekeeping for the rental portion and how, or if, they separate it out from DVC.
 


Those are some decent sized contracts at CCV, average is 188 points per contract. With the increased price at CCV, I’m surprised to see that many.
 


Trending well again for a mid month report. 35 new deeds at SSR could be driving some of the ROFR activity as well.

For RIV, is similar sales continue, close to $80K by end of month...improving from last month.

Thanks for doing it all!
 
I am just laughing at how hard people try to make sales sound.

RIV 20% at this point.

20% were sold within 12 months of sales at which point the resort had only been operational 30 days before COVID19 entered daily vocabulary and only was open exactly 3 months December 16 to March 15 before being closed for months.

* The most points it has sold in a month is in January at 181,000 points. At that pace, it will take them another 28 months to sell out.
* The second highest points sold was in March at 153,000 points. At that pace it will take them another 33 months to sell out.

You basically just named 2 of the 3 months it was open before the Parks closed. I would suspect February would have been a top month as well.

So lets round up to 40 months or a total of 4 years to completely sell out if COVID didn't happen. That would have had it sell out in 2022 when Reflections was supposed to launch. This was exactly in line with what Disney wanted (look at CCV its still selling after a year of RIV being offered).

* For September, they sold 66,000 points. At that pace, it will take them another 78 months to sell out.

As for the 78 more months to sell out or any math made based on it. It does not really matter in relation to DVC management, their view on resale restrictions, and changes. Why? Because there is an expectation of much lower sales during these times.

That's another 3.5 years. Keep in mind, Disney has already been selling Riviera since May 2019 or 17 months. The total time period? 60 months, or 5 years. To me, that's selling pretty poorly.
Sorry but to call it "selling poorly" is laughable. They could have never had resale restrictions and they wouldn't be in that much better of a position right now for the COVID-19 months. Again they would have been on track to sell out within 4 years which was right in line with Reflections opening so obviously that was the projection out of DVC management.
 
Honestly while the numbers are still low, the recovery in direct sales has been better than I would have expected.
I was honestly shocked back in July when the first numbers came out about RIV sales on how well it did.

Those are some decent sized contracts at CCV, average is 188 points per contract. With the increased price at CCV, I’m surprised to see that many.

I think part of this is from incentives possibly. So the price increase might have actually helped?
 
Again they would have been on track to sell out within 4 years which was right in line with Reflections opening so obviously that was the projection out of DVC management.

I think this is the best guess as to what DVC's sales expectations were - sell it out as the next one comes on-line.
How can sales possibly be considered a failure when it was well on it's way to that target pre-covid?
 
I am just laughing at how hard people try to make sales sound.

...

Sorry but to call it "selling poorly" is laughable. They could have never had resale restrictions and they wouldn't be in that much better of a position right now for the COVID-19 months. Again they would have been on track to sell out within 4 years which was right in line with Reflections opening so obviously that was the projection out of DVC management.

I think we can just agree to disagree on this. I think it's laughable how hard people try to make sales sound great and you think the opposite. Covid did happen and this is becoming like the dress on the Internet where people are convinced they see one color or the other.
 
I think we can just agree to disagree on this. I think it's laughable how hard people try to make sales sound great and you think the opposite. Covid did happen and this is becoming like the dress on the Internet where people are convinced they see one color or the other.

Except COVID did happen... So no amount of change to the policy around resale restrictions or benefits is going to change how quickly RIV would be selling out.

"Going poorly" is relative to the world we live in. No one is saying sales are at an all time high right now.

Historical September:
2019 - 174k (104k RIV / 28k CCV)
2018 - 156k (129k CCV)
2017 - 187k (93k Poly / 66k CCV)
2016 - 155k (133k Poly)

So the RIV 66k is approximately 35% to 42% of the typical total sales for the month of September. This with park capacity "at 25%" (we all know way less than that back in August/September when the contracts were bought to be recorded), a global pandemic, a bad outlook on short term travel over the next 12-18 months, and looming financial issues.

I am not sure how that doesn't spell a good month in comparison to what you would expect numbers to plummet to.

This whole discussion is around "is RIV not selling well because of resale restrictions and point charts". Changes to either of those is not changing anything. The historical pre-closure is also important to point to because it shows the DVC expectation of 4 years to sell out (then launch of Reflections) means that the resort was on pace to hit target. Thus in DVC management's eyes it was selling as expected.

So I ask you then what would your expectation be if RIV was selling on average or good right now? What would your targets be?

My targets for a good month would likely be at 30% of 140k points or 42k points. This is based on an excepted slight YOY increase from '18/'19 sales for primary DVC resort sales. Then accounting for park closure which reduces traffic by 25% to the parks where a majority of sales would come from. The extra 5% in total sales (or 25% of the total sales for Sept could be expected to be driven via website/phones above and beyond their normal percentage of sales driven). I am missing a bit of data so that could be adjusted.

EDIT: Wanted to add no other resort to my knowledge has had to ever also compete with discounting on historically sold out resorts.
 
Except COVID did happen... So no amount of change to the policy around resale restrictions or benefits is going to change how quickly RIV would be selling out.

Exactly. So there is no way to know how sales would have gone during the Covid months. Now that Covid has happpened, you can't reverse the trend to see exactly who would have been right. However, if you want to spend a few more posts on how much you believe you're right, go ahead. I don't think you're changing many opinions either way, but if it's still fun for you, go ahead.
 
Exactly. So there is no way to know how sales would have gone during the Covid months. Now that Covid has happpened, you can't reverse the trend to see exactly who would have been right. However, if you want to spend a few more posts on how much you believe you're right, go ahead. I don't think you're changing many opinions either way, but if it's still fun for you, go ahead.

Except you can take cues from the 12 months of sales plus the 3 months when the resort opened. Its not exactly rocket science and pretty standard in the business realm regarding sales and projections.

Again tell me what you would expect them to hit right now if it were average or going good? The only "data" people seem to bring is their thoughts nothing actual tangible. If you want to say its going bad then thats fine but bring some evidence otherwise you might as well move along since its like the Yelp reviewer who leaves a one word review with a rating.
 
EDIT: Wanted to add no other resort to my knowledge has had to ever also compete with discounting on historically sold out resorts.
Perhaps this is the gold/blue dress.

One can look at that same point and ask: What other actively selling resort has needed to resort to discounting older properties so guides can make sales?

I suspect sales are doing just fine (certainly better than should be expected) and Riviera would’ve likely sold out as quickly as CCV, if not faster, had it not been for the whole “four horsemen partying like it’s 2020” thing, but I think the fact that they chose to discount sold out resorts, something never before done, does speak to how they projected being able to get people to buy in who may not otherwise if Riviera/Aulani were the only offering.

ETA- and discounting sold-out resorts may speak specifically to how sales are doing among current owners.
 
Riviera will sell out at some point regardless of whether some folks want it to or not (as all other DVC properties at WDW have in the past). Right now, DVC has no other new on-site properties to sell anyway so the timeframe isn't all that relevant.
 
Does anyone think DVC theming is a bit “safe“, which is not to put people off but they could increase it a bit.
With this new resort they could have really Disney’d it a bit more and that would have captured more hearts.

I would personally love a real Tower ofTerror hotel!!
 
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Perhaps this is the gold/blue dress.

One can look at that same point and ask: What other actively selling resort has needed to resort to discounting older properties so guides can make sales?

I suspect sales are doing just fine (certainly better than should be expected) and Riviera would’ve likely sold out as quickly as CCV, if not faster, had it not been for the whole “four horsemen partying like it’s 2020” thing, but I think the fact that they chose to discount sold out resorts, something never before done, does speak to how they projected being able to get people to buy in who may not otherwise if Riviera/Aulani were the only offering.

ETA- and discounting sold-out resorts may speak specifically to how sales are doing among current owners.
I think discounting sold out resorts have far more to do with Covid-19 than anything else - a period where the resorts and parks were shut down for 3 months and sales offices shut for 4. Absolutely no direct sales happened for 4 months and no ROFR occurred. That’s the type of thing that would cause a business to consider offering deals they never have before in order to get sales.

As someone who works with data a lot, I’m not entirely certain here that I agree this is just a gold/blue dress. The challenge is that we don’t have all the data, which is Disney’s projections for RIV sales. But, as Sethschroeder said: “Except you can take cues from the 12 months of sales plus the 3 months when the resort opened.“. That kind of data is used in sales, business & P&L projection models all the time. They would’ve used that kind of info from previous sales - plus other data points - to create their initial projections and then used that 12 months of sales data to inform how they were doing. Unfortunately, we don’t know what Disney expected, but the initial data showed it selling surprisingly well, especially based on the assumptions in this forum on how badly it would do.

I can’t say that I know what the expectations are NOW during Covid, but a timeshare business that is still hitting 40% of its original sales numbers during a global pandemic when travel is widely discouraged is at least doing far better than most might expect. I’d be curious to know how well or not other timeshare companies are doing against their precovid numbers.
 
Exactly. So there is no way to know how sales would have gone during the Covid months. Now that Covid has happpened, you can't reverse the trend to see exactly who would have been right. However, if you want to spend a few more posts on how much you believe you're right, go ahead. I don't think you're changing many opinions either way, but if it's still fun for you, go ahead.

I agree that those that see the numbers as poor are not going to be convinced.

But in reality, sales at RIV, at the very least, were competitive to prior resorts before Covid, Depending how you analyze, some say doing just as well, some say not quite.

I have posted before, but not sure where the notion came from that every new DVC has to outperform the previous one,

It still comes down to the fact that the restrictions did not have the devastating impact on sales that many thought it would and there is no reason to believe that DVD thinks that, based on what happened with incentives, etc.

Once COVID hit, the incentives were pretty good when sales reopened but then reduced. To me, that implies they were surprised with what sold and felt a lower incentive would work. New data for mid October sales appear to show people buying and that October will sell more than September,

To add, they up the minimum for blue card, Again, implies to me that sales goals are not the same as they once were and DVD is ino rush any longer to sell, especially since Reflections has been scrapped for now.

Using RIV as a deluxe option for cash..which is now going to be 35% off for the winter...saves the company by not having to open others...so maybe one division goals being lower is okay as overall it helps the others

Nothing points to restrictions going away. But, since none of us are part of DVDs management team, we get to guess and analyze different ways!
 
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