That's how you sell timeshares, by describing your particular implementation as innovation, often by explicit misrepresentation of the existing ones or implicit misrepresentation of yours (describing others maintenance/management fees as expensive and/or hidden while you have and do not highlight your own fees of the same kind being a common example of the latter.)
My parents have been timeshare owners for years so I'm very familiar with the sales tactics resorts use. Regardless of how they spin it, all you really own is a block of time. With Ancana your purchase is a deeded right to the property. You are an actual home owner. Where the difference becomes clear is when you can use the property (fixed weeks vs. on-demand) and what happens when you want to sell the property. Resorts force you to sell your time back to them and they dictate the prices. With an Ancana home, we will help find a buyer from our network of qualified leads, or you are free to sell through an agent of your choosing or on your own. The market dictates what the property sells for, not Ancana. We retain no ownership stake in the property once all of the fractions are sold.
As for fees, we simply split the ongoing property costs amongst the co-owners with no markup. We do charge an annual management fee for administering and maintaining the property, but this is fixed and transparent.
> My parents have been timeshare owners for years so I'm very familiar with the sales tactics resorts use. Regardless of how they spin it, all you really own is a block of time. With Ancana your purchase is a deeded right to the property.
Most modern “timeshares” (the word remains current in common use though the technicalities have changed and the industry has mostly moved to “vacation ownership”) are deeded straight to the property and use this as a differentiating sales tactic to people's image of timeshares not being that way. I also have been a timeshare owner for years, and that's been the case with each except on in Mexico sold in blocks of weeks per year for a limited term of years because the market was largely international and Mexican law limits foreign ownership of coastal property.
> Resorts force you to sell your time back to them and they dictate the prices
No, they mostly don’t; that what is sold is freely marketable fee simple ownership is a heavily marketed feature of most. There are even real estate brokers that specialize in this market.
Though differentiating on the perception that most other vacation ownership options do this is very common in the industry.
Would it be accurate to say that Ancana is to timeshares as Airbnb is to hotels (a technical distinction without major practical differences to the end user), or would it be more accurate to say that Ancana is literally just a specific type of timeshare?
If the latter, does the elevator pitch of Ancana make it at least seem like a uniquely good/interesting timeshare implementation, or could the same description be applied verbatim to other major timeshare services already on the market?
> If the latter, does the elevator pitch of Ancana make it at least seem like a uniquely good/interesting timeshare implementation
I think using units that are individual homes with a small number of owners per property potentially has some interesting dynamics. The guaranteed ability ro reserve a (even if not the single most preferred) high-demand date each year is an obvious plus from that.
Conflicts within the ownership group, particularly over relationships to property management are very much a thing in shared-interest vacation ownership. Typically these are intense, political, but (for most owners) impersonal because of the size of ownership groups. With small-group ownership of individual properties, there would seem to be a possibility for those to be much more intense and personal, both because of the smaller group size that is involved and the greater sense of attachment/ownership of the specific property.
