With the fractional ownership industry on the verge of a potential boom in areas such as Europe and Asia, can those who have been selling and marketing fractional developments for several years shed any light on the best ways to market this type of product to consumers?

As a sociologist, from my findings so far, I discovered that most developers concentrate efforts on popular places like America, Europe, Southern Africa and Asia. There should be effort to discover new places, wonders and new tourists attracted places in the world. One of the solution is to make researches on places to invest in. But investors are afraid to step on to new discoveries because they do not know how profitable this will be. A good research with adequate resources, devoid of subjectivity and personal interest will yield positive result. A poor research is a waste of time. Believe me, there are lots of places that has never been explored. People there do not even know what fractional ownership is. And hundreds of thousands of these people can afford this product. I am still working on this, progress I will share with us soon.

I think that you will find that selling fractional as well as any product has its challenges involved with marketing and unfortunatley, marketing a half million dollar fractional is more difficult than marketing a twenty thousand dollar timeshare. I am not sure where you are located or if you are trying to sell offsite or on, but finding your market is always the first step. Mail drops are a way to start but the return is not always that great, however a cross directory in the United States will help to pinpoint where you mail is dropped and insure you of the income level of the neighborhoods you are dropping. If you are an onsite location an OPC booth can be effective but be careful of the qualifications you have and remember the clientel you must have and the things they expect as well as the types of gifts that would bring them to your presentation. Other than that there are box programs as well as newspaper, magazines, television and radio spots, but they can be expensive and don’t always produce the desired results. I have found that maketing a fractional in the same way that you would market whole ownership can work as well but it takes time to develope your leads. A great fly/buy program can always be successful but again takes time to accomplish, and of course an incredible referral program for your existing owners will always produce your highest closing percentage. A combination of all of these are your best bet as I have found that a few leads from a lot of programs is better than putting all your faith into one, but again it depends on your budget. I hope that this is of some help and if you can give me a little more information as to your product and what you would like to accomplish I would be willing to try to help. Good luck and good selling.

I’ve spent that last 8 years marketing The Ritz-Carlton Club & Residences – most recently as The Regional Director, East & Caribbean. The quick answer to the question is that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution. One critical component is targeting your efforts to the correct demographic / psychographic within your sales & marketing plan. Who is your audience? Who are your buyers? Where will they come from? Are all of your marketing efforts (collateral material, web site, video and photography assets, social media, direct mail, media campaigns, PR efforts) in alignment with this audience? The keys to my success were well planned, strategic, balanced channel marketing efforts. I was typically “given” an annual sales volume target that we were required to produce by site. I would then create sales & marketing budgets that accounted for sales volume, lead generation, closing percentages, etc. and account for all marketing costs by products sold; by marketing channel; by month – all rolling up to the annual budget. Concurrently, tactical plans were created that accounted for every marketing effort and corresponding lead flow, cost, conversion % and sales volume. The marketing channels involved included media, direct sale (owner referral), linkage (our hotel marketing efforts), broker, E-marketing. PR and direct mail. The marketing channel mix would differ at each site. You obviously would like most of your sales to come from high conversion / low cost channels (owner referral) and less from your higher cost / lower conversion channels (media and direct mail). The life-span stage of your development (start-up vs. mature) partially dictates this mix. Having a strategic master plan, followed by precise execution of the plan takes the mystery out of your marketing spending and sales production (actual vs. budget). It also allows you to manage and measure your programs and adeptly “change on the fly” should a program work exceedingly well or below expectations. All of this requires thoughtful, reasonable projections and ultimately a leap of faith to move forward. Please contact me for more information as I now provide consulting services on the above.

Hello Savio,
I am the regional coordinator for Fractions Abroad ltd, a European based fractional ownership model provider with over 90 international developments.
I can be of assistance to set you up with the fractional legal framework, calendars, fractional marketing and sales support.
I would be interested to have a look at your Brazilian developments and see if it is feasible.
Have a look at the following websites that will give you an idea of what we do.

http://portal.fractionsabroad.com/ (our property portal where we feature some of the developments around the world we are working with -this website is designed to educate buyers)
http://info.fractionsabroad.com/ (this is our main tutorial site which is tutorial by nature and is meant to educate our developers and agents) You will have to register on our site, because it contains a lot of intellectual property, but the process is fast and free and once you have registered you will have access to a lot of very useful info.

Without boasting off, I think we are the most affordable and the most developer-friendly fractional model provider on the market.

Please give me your contact info and I could send you some fractional documentation for your review and we can schedule a talk to explore possibilities of collaboration.

Many thanks,

Kind regards,

Mihai Algiu
Regional Affiliate
Fractions Abroad Ltd

US Mobile: +1 530 632 7513
email: mihai@fractionsabroad.com
skype: mihairesearch
web: http://www.fractionsabroad.com