October 13, 2010
How Condo Hotels Are Different From The Traditional Timeshare
Traditional timeshares are properties that are jointly owned by a group of people and overseen by a management company. The partial ownership in the timeshare allows owners to vacation in their own timeshare during designated blocks on time during the year. The latest wave of timeshare properties are “condotels” or condo hotels.
Condo hotels are different from traditional timeshares in a few ways. While traditional timeshares are almost always solely used for vacation purposes, condo hotels can be primary residences for occupants. These residents more than likely do not spend the entire year though, because the whole point of a condo hotel is to live in the condo when you want to, and then rent it out to vacationers when you’re gone. The condo hotels are designed to be both residential units and hotels at the same time, allowing access to hotel-type amenities such as pools and restaurants even to occupants who spend months living in one of the condos. The biggest draws to condo hotel ownership is that, the condo renting is done by the management company, thus occupants don’t need to deal with the hassle of searching vacationers and then screening possible occupants themselves. Places such as Miami, Las Vegas and even Los Angeles see these few developments coming out all over the city. ACTUALLY, some of the hotels in Las Vegas offer an area of their building as condotels, permitting partial ownership to occupants while staying amongst the best city in the world. As these kinds of places are prime locations for not only people who are taking their vacations but corporate businesspeople as well, this kind of arrangement could do a lot of sense. An individual who only wants to spend half of his/her year in a particular city could buy a condo hotel property and make use of it when they’re in the city, and then just spend the rest of the year gathering a check from rental proceeds.
What is the downside to this sort of arrangement? Many people simply do not like the idea of renting out their homes, even if the homes are used solely for vacation purposes. Although it is true that the renting and maintenance is handled by the management company there is never any guarantee that a group of vacationing tenants won’t turn out to be zealous partygoers who are bent on trashing their vacation abode. There’s always a risk when permitting strangers to reside temporarily in a condotel. Obviously if a person has issues with other people having access to their home then this sort of arrangement is not suitable for them in the least.
One of the reasons why people like the idea of renting out a condo hotel is because of the lure of rental income. However, one must put in mind that as with any other kind of property, there’s no guarantee of occupants. A condo hotel could be empty of occupants for months due to any kind of disaster like an earthquake in California or a hurricane in Florida. Condo hotels owners should never consider on rental income as an assured asset. Owners of condo hotel would almost certainly be much better off seeing the rental income as an extra benefit to ownership not as a major source of proceeds.
Because of the difficulty and inflexibility in many cases of selling, traditional timeshares had garnered bad reputation in lots of circles. Condo hotels, however, allow much more flexibility because it is the tenant who is calling the shots and deciding when to use the property and when to rent it out. Selling a condo hotel can be a bit difficult depending upon the real estate and vacationers market at the time, but since these condo hotels are usually located in highly popular areas they are not too difficult to pass on to someone else. Tenants benefit from a rental income and the hotel itself benefits from a steady stream of visitors who utilize their services. If a person is looking to purchase some sort of vacation home it makes sense to check out condo hotels. A vacation house that includes occasional rental income could be a good thing indeed.
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