A Timeshare Salesperson Will Call It an Investment. The Resale Market Says Otherwise
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5 min read
Sit through a resort sales presentation anywhere from Orlando to Nusa Dua and you will hear the word "investment" a lot. A timeshare is the right to use a vacation property, usually one week a year, forever, or for a fixed number of years, either at one specific resort or across a network of resorts through a points system. The pitch says it locks in tomorrow's vacations at today's price. The resale market, where actual timeshare owners try to sell what they bought, tells a very different story about what that right is worth once you already own it.
There are two common structures. A deeded week gives you ownership of a specific unit for a specific week, recorded like a small slice of real estate. A points-based vacation club membership, the more common structure sold today, gives you an annual allotment of points to redeem across a network of resorts, with no single unit tied to your name. Either way, you are paying up front for future vacation nights, plus an annual fee to keep the arrangement running, whether or not you use it that year.
The American Resort Development Association's 2026-edition industry study, prepared by Ernst & Young and covering full-year 2025 data, puts the average U.S. timeshare purchase price at $24,740 (about Rp442.6 million at today's USD/IDR rate of 17,890, per Pluang, 26 September 2026). That number covers 1,434 resorts and roughly 188,700 units in the United States alone; Indonesia's own vacation club market, sold through brands like Marriott Vacation Club at its Bali Nusa Dua Gardens property, Marriott's first vacation-ownership resort in the country, runs on the same points and annual-fee structure but does not publish its own aggregated price data the way the U.S. industry does, so this article uses the U.S. figures as the best sourced benchmark available.
The purchase price is only the entry fee. The same ARDA/Ernst & Young study puts the average annual maintenance fee at $1,550 per interval in 2025, up 38% from $1,120 in 2021. That fee is billed every year, rises most years, and is owed whether you visit the resort once, twice, or not at all.
This is the part the sales presentation does not cover. Once an owner decides to sell, resale specialists and industry trackers consistently report that timeshare resale prices land 40% to 80% below the original developer price, and that a meaningful share of listings find no buyer at any price. It is common enough that owners advertise timeshares for a symbolic $1 just to be rid of the annual fee: Club Thrifty documented a Marriott Aruba Surf Club week that sold on eBay for exactly $1, after which the new owner took on roughly $2,400 a year in maintenance fees (about Rp42.9 million), indefinitely, for a unit the original buyer could not give away for free.
| Line item | Amount (USD) | Amount (IDR, @17,890) |
|---|---|---|
| Average purchase price (2025) | $24,740 | Rp442,598,600 |
| Average annual maintenance fee (2025) | $1,550 | Rp27,729,500 |
| Ten years of fees, at the 2025 rate with no further increases | $15,500 | Rp277,295,000 |
| Total money paid in over 10 years | $40,240 | Rp719,893,600 |
| Typical resale value after 10 years (40-80% below purchase price) | $4,948 to $14,844 | Rp88.5 million to Rp265.6 million |
The maintenance fee has risen every year on record since 2021, so treating it as flat for a decade almost certainly understates the real total. Even in the better-case 60% resale outcome, a buyer who paid and maintained the timeshare for ten years gets back roughly a third of what they put in, and that is before counting what the same money could have earned sitting in almost anything else.
If you already hold a timeshare or vacation club membership, log it as a manual asset on your Holdings page. NetWort's closest built-in category is Real Estate, which defaults to a 3% annual appreciation assumption. The resale data above says that default does not fit a timeshare, so it is worth entering a negative annual rate that reflects what the unit would actually fetch if sold today, not what was paid for it.