Buyers Who Never Existed: The Timeshare Resale Calls That Promised a Sale Already Lined Up

Owners of timeshare properties looking to sell often become targets for telemarketers offering exactly the solution they are looking for: a buyer, ready and waiting. According to a federal complaint, Vacation Property Services, Inc. made tens of thousands of unsolicited telemarketing calls to timeshare owners falsely claiming that the company already had, or could quickly find, buyers for the owners' properties.DOCUMENTED

A federal court later found the company and its manager and owner, Albert M. Wilson, liable for violating the FTC Act and the Telemarketing Sales Rule, resulting in a settlement that permanently bans Wilson from the timeshare resale and rental business and from all telemarketing.DOCUMENTED

What the complaint alleges

According to the FTC's March 2011 complaint, Vacation Property Services misrepresented both the existence of ready buyers for consumers' timeshare properties and the company's own refund policy, all while demanding that consumers pay a large up-front fee to facilitate a sale.DOCUMENTED The complaint also alleged the company called hundreds of thousands of consumers whose phone numbers were listed on the National Do Not Call Registry, a separate and independently actionable violation of the Telemarketing Sales Rule.DOCUMENTED

What the court found

In May 2012, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida entered summary judgment against Vacation Property Services and Wilson.DOCUMENTED The court held that the company deceived consumers into paying large up-front fees by claiming it had buyers lined up, or would find buyers, to purchase consumers' timeshare properties, and separately held that the company violated the Telemarketing Sales Rule by calling numbers listed on the National Do Not Call Registry.DOCUMENTED The court found there were genuine issues of material fact regarding whether Wilson personally had sufficient knowledge of the company's misstatements and illegal calls to be held financially liable individually — a distinction that matters because it determines whether a company's owner can be held personally responsible for a corporation's violations, rather than allowing individual liability to be shielded entirely behind the corporate form.DOCUMENTED

Why the resale pitch is a recurring problem

Timeshare owners looking to exit an ownership they no longer want or can afford are a recurring target for exactly this kind of pitch, precisely because a promised buyer addresses the owner's most pressing problem directly, with no independent way for the consumer to verify the claim before paying an up-front fee.REVIEWED The FTC has brought numerous cases over the years against operators making some version of this same claim — that a buyer is ready, or nearly ready, to purchase a timeshare a consumer wants to unload — spanning both the resale side of the industry, as in this case, and the more recently prominent “timeshare exit” side, where operators instead promise to cancel a consumer's ongoing ownership obligations entirely.

The court found the company deceived consumers by claiming it had buyers lined up for timeshares it had, in fact, no ability to sell.

Why the case matters

Under the settlement resolving the case following the court's summary judgment ruling, Wilson is permanently banned from the timeshare resale and rental business and from telemarketing of any kind.DOCUMENTED For timeshare owners still fielding calls from resale companies today, the case is a reminder that a claim of a specific, ready buyer is exactly the kind of representation regulators have found companies making without any factual basis — and that legitimate resale transactions do not typically require large up-front fees paid before any sale has actually closed.

Why timeshares are difficult to resell legitimately

The secondary market for timeshare interests is thin and illiquid compared to markets for other real estate, in part because ongoing maintenance fee obligations attach to the ownership interest regardless of whether the current owner actually uses the property, making timeshare interests a less attractive purchase for most buyers than a comparable outright real estate purchase would be.REVIEWED That structural weakness in resale demand is precisely what schemes like Vacation Property Services' exploit: an owner eager to exit an unwanted or unaffordable obligation is a receptive audience for a caller claiming to have solved the very liquidity problem that makes timeshares difficult to sell in the first place.

How the Do Not Call violations added a separate legal claim

Beyond the substantive deception allegations regarding fabricated buyers, the complaint's separate claim that Vacation Property Services called numbers listed on the National Do Not Call Registry gave the FTC an independently provable violation that did not require proving the underlying deception at all.REVIEWED Do Not Call violations are comparatively straightforward to establish through call records and registry cross-checks, and regulators frequently pair this kind of easily documented violation alongside harder-to-prove deception claims in a single complaint, strengthening the overall case even if a court were to find the evidence on the core deception allegation less conclusive.

What legitimate timeshare resale looks like by comparison

Licensed real estate brokers who handle legitimate timeshare resales typically work on a commission basis paid only after a sale actually closes, rather than demanding a substantial fee upfront before any buyer has been identified.REVIEWED An owner contacted by a company demanding payment before a sale, rather than as a percentage of proceeds after one, is encountering a payment structure that inverts the incentive a legitimate resale agent would have to actually find a buyer — since a company paid upfront has already been compensated whether or not a sale, or a buyer, ever materializes.

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