DVC Rental Store just sent me a promo for $19 per point on new 0-7 month reservations.
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As an owner or renter?
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Renter. I don’t own DVC. I paid way more than that from them. They have the best I’ve found cancelation policy and you only have to put a deposit down and can pay over time. You do get a credit vs a refund for a cancelation but it’s also only the amount you’ve actually paid. You have 1 year (I think) from the initial reservation to use the funds.
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I’m not trying to sell them but it’s a decent deal if you are worried about losing $$ to canceling or want the option to pay over time.
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That’s who I used. The deposit I paid for the canceled trip funds my May trip. Absolutely no hassle, even though I canceled two months of bookings. And rebooking for this trip was super easy.
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I think the biggest difference I saw is the cancellation and up front payment policy combined with the opposite cost if that makes sense. Aka DVCRentalStore charges less upfront and lets you cancel up to a point but overall charges more. David’s is usually cheaper than DVCRentalStore but you gotta pay it all up front if they can match what you want and can’t cancel. I’ve only used the other main one DVCShop for guaranteed rezzies. They seem to have more of those in my experience. But when it comes to guaranteed I just check all three sites for the best deal that meets my date needs.
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Comically, I hate that the “loophole” I use to get a deluxe room at a moderate price is being “exploited” (in my mind). Haha.
From having only used David’s in the past, I just assumed all the dedicated reservations were people that rented and something came up. But having just tried to rent at the Poly for January 2024 recently and being told there is no availability (although I get that marathon week isn’t exactly dead, especially with the timing next year), I’m assuming the rental market is just getting owners to book phantom stays to post and hope.
If that’s the case, I’d assume this would drive owners crazy too, as it puts even more pressure at the 11 month point.
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There is a DVC Reservations owners and renters FB page I just recently followed. I swear almost every post is a dedicated reservation. I started to think that too. It really does hurt overall availability. If an owner just grabs a popular set of days for future sale it really sucks.
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People are definitely booking with the intent of playing the angles -
Here’s the studio rental data for OKW from last May until the end of this year. You can clearly see they are booking straight lines of rooms a certain number of days apart and listing them at various amounts.
I’ve highlighted the larger ones - and I filtered to bookings 5 days or longer so there wouldn’t be too many dots to see them easily!
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They have a few sites of FB that is for renting points and it’s full of people listing dedicated dates. I may have trolled a few last night bc I was bored 
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This. I know I will never get a Boardwalk on New Year’s Eve.
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As much as I dislike their policy of asking owners who want to rent points out to book a stay to rent out, iI don’t see that it adds extra pressure to the booking process.
Someone is going to book those rooms. And at peak times that will be because of owners booking there in order to stay. Very few people are going to walk reservations in order to simply rent them out. And those that do aren’t doing so because of the brokers. They’d rent them out privately, like they always have done.
Race weekends have always been busy. So has NYE, although it’s sometimes easier to book NYE than the beginning of December.
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I’m assuming you were told this by a broker? Because there is still availability at the Poly for the marathon weekend. So they just mean they don’t have a Poly owner who wants to rent points out. And unless it was Davids, that could also be because they strongly encourage people to book a stay and rent it out as a confirmed rental instead.
That policy could play into David’s hands too, who are still focussing on the more traditional rental model.
Just checking in more detail, the 3rd of Jan is the night that both Standard and Lake view studios are booked up at the Poly. That might be because that’s the day that blackout restrictions are lifted for AP holders.
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Yeah. That’s what I saw too. I’m looking to stay Jan 1-8, so that middle day is what I assume made David’s say that there isn’t availability at the Poly.
I totally get that the NYE/later school vacation/marathon week is creating more demand than the typical marathon year. This is what I get for planning “last minute”! Haha.
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I’m not an owner, but i have rented points sometimes, and I follow a FB group. I am convinced that for a number of people, renting out their points is a side hustle. I’ve been surprised there’s not more discussion of that here, as I think it’s a factor to consider as I weigh buying my own points.
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It definitely is. Some people buy points with the intention of mostly renting them ans then some I’m sure just can’t afford to go or want to go somewhere different. I rent points. I just hate that some owners book a time frame with no renter in mind only to lost it for rent. Some posts say they have x points to be rented in part or whole by x date for x amount of $$. That’s how it should be done.
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There are a couple of owners on Disboards who own like a million points each. (Hopefully I’m getting that scale right. Maybe it was a million dollars worth of points? That sounds more reasonable. It was a lot of points.)
Holy Crap! 
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I did see owners on Mouseowners (RIP) who had around 5000-8000 points available per year.
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I think this is 100% more and more what is happening. I think it’s just easier for the rental agents and the rentees to do this rather than go back and forth between 3 parties.
I feel like this potentially ups the demand for the already high demand periods. People who want to rent out their points in general are booking a high demand week/weekend knowing that it will be easier to rent out and perhaps command a higher price point. In the regular rental space they might just rent any old week that somebody had requested.
That’s definitely worth a million dollars!
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