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Re: Successful Resales & Rental Feedback Wanted (by Beck):

Due to privacy laws and veils, you will not be able to call the resort on your own to verify the ownership. Ensure your contract provides an agreement from the owner authorizing you to contact the resort to ask detailed quesitons about thier ownership. Once you fax the authorization, they will discuss details with you.

To be certain the seller owns the week, both the authorization so you can speak with the resort, and a simple online search for the seller's deed at the county recorder will support your knowledge they do indeed own. You might be at the efficiency of the closing company in regard to knowing if the seller owes money on the unit or is late paying any fees. Usually you can ask the resort about this, or ask the closing comapny to provide the estoppels they collect from the resort. All in all, based on your question, you will be highly challenged to notice any issues there could be with the ownership and even if you do the steos I list there could still be issues with your ownership. For example, if the deed lists a husband and wife but only the husband deeds to you, you might eventually have difficulty when selling later on.

I think the size of deposit is up to you. If you don't like how large it is and they won't budge, don't buy the unit. ROFR requires a sales agreement. marriott and other resorts take 1-4 weeks to review the sales contracts and decide if they will buy the unit from the owner at the price you agreed to pay or allow you to buy it from the owner. If Marriott exercises ROFR then the closing company is supposed to refund all your deposit to you. Just read the contract to see what steps they take.

This isn't always accurate, but generally if Marriott accepts you as an owner then usually the title transfer was acceptable to them. You could still have an issue if something was missed by the seller, closing company, or Marriott but it's been my experience title gets figured out by one of them.

I've had a few issues where the seller agrees to transfer the current year use and I pay them the current year maintenance but when I become the owner it turns out the seller indicated to the resort they will keep the use, or they banked the unit to exchange. Watch out for that! No sense paying for something you don't get. No one, not the seller, closing company, nor timeshare will bring to your attention the fact the seller agreed to provide use but didn't.