The Truth About Timeshare Exit Companies
You went looking for a way out of your timeshare. You typed “timeshare cancellation” into Google, and up came a wall of companies all saying the same thing: we can help, we guarantee results, and if we can’t get you out, you get your money back.
So how is it that every one of these companies knows some secret the rest of us don’t? Is there a back room somewhere, a velvet rope, a members-only club where the real timeshare exit knowledge gets handed out?
No. There isn’t.
What there is, mostly, is a business model built to separate you from your money. By the end of this, you’ll understand why so many timeshare exit companies would fit right in on an episode of American Greed.
Unmasking The Two Main Types of Exit Companies
Strip away the marketing and almost every timeshare exit service is one of two things.
The first is a sales company. Selling you the cancellation service is the whole business. Once you pay, they either attempt the cancellation themselves or, far more often, they hand your file off to a third-party “transfer service” and move on to the next sale.
The second is a law firm. A real one takes these cases and, because attorneys are bound by ethics rules, can’t promise you a specific outcome. It usually costs more, because you’re paying for actual legal work instead of a sales script.
That difference is the whole ballgame. Hold onto it.
The Problem With Timeshare Exit Sales Companies
Picture the call. A friendly voice tells you they’d like to “review your case for escalation.” That person isn’t a lawyer or a case manager. They’re an appointment setter, and their only job is to collect your information and pass you to the “closer,” who will lean on you until you sign.
Here’s what to watch for:
They dress up like a law firm. Words like “legal” and “law” show up in the company name to make you feel safe. It’s a costume. They are not a law firm.
Their entire strategy is for you to stop paying. That’s it. Stop your payments, wreck your credit, and wait around for the resort to foreclose somewhere down the road. You can do that on your own, for free, without handing anyone five figures.
The resorts won’t deal with them. Resorts know exactly who these outfits are. They toss the letters in the trash or fire back a form response telling you to drop the service.
We’ve taken on a lot of clients who started with one of these companies. It ends the same way every time, and the owner is the one who pays for it. We’ve seen resorts turn around and sue the owner for working with a company that operated in bad faith.
The Part of the Business They’d Rather You Not See
Here’s the thing the industry keeps quiet. Hardly any of these companies do the work themselves.
A lawyer’s photo on the website? That often means nothing. Some of these companies pay an attorney a small monthly fee just to rent the name and the face. That attorney may never so much as open your file.
After you sign, your file gets shipped to a third party. Soon you get a call from this new company, saying they’re working “on behalf of” the one you hired. They put more paperwork in front of you, including something called a Strategic Default Disclosure, or SDD.
That document exists to protect them, not you. It says, in writing, that stopping your payments was your idea. You and I both know who actually told you to stop. They might even toss in “credit protection” to soften the blow, but by then the damage is already in motion.
And the money? The sales company paid that third party somewhere between $700 and $2,500 to babysit your file until the resort forecloses. You may have handed the sales company $10,000. They pocketed the difference. For that price, you got someone to watch your account fall apart.
So How Is The Stonegate Firm Any Different?
Fair question, and yes, this is the part where I tell you about us. I’ll keep it straight, because what we do really is built differently.
The Stonegate Firm is the only timeshare exit company with a co-branded law firm, which means your case has real levels of escalation behind it if it ever needs them.
We also don’t go in swinging. You have every reason to be furious with your resort. We’re not, because anger doesn’t get you out any faster. Our job is to get you free of the timeshare as quickly and cleanly as possible, so we approach the resort with respect and look for common ground.
If the resort pushes back on our first letter, your case escalates and you get real limited-scope legal representation under federal consumer protection law. You will never get that from a sales company or one of its third-party partners. Not once. Not ever.
The service is the other half of it. Our phones get answered. You hear from us often. You don’t get signed up and forgotten, and you don’t get quietly shipped off to a stranger.
We’ve shaken up this industry simply by being honest with people. Our approach is clean enough that we’ve had timeshare developers thank us for the way we handled a case. In this business, that almost never happens.
If you are looking for help with your timeshare and don’t want to risk financial ruin, contact us and let’s see if we can help.
