Michelle DuChamp
Putting It All Together
As the concluding speaker of the TBMA 2022 Providence Meeting, Michelle DuChamp, head of Vacatia Partner Services, set forth an overview of the entire day’s presentations. Her firm provides rental, resale, property-management, funding, and finance solutions, and her presentation touched on all of these – beginning with deferred maintenance and its impact on declining owner and renter appeal.
Non-performing inventory represents an opportunity to generate rental income that can be used to maintain the property. “We’ve made significant impacts because the property itself just didn’t know how to do rentals,” she said. “We have one resort that did $27,000 in rentals in 2019. We came in and did $400,000 in rentals in 2021.
“Focusing on rentals is key, and then sales. You want to try to bring in new people. When you have a deferred-maintenance problem, that’s a little bit more difficult to do, especially on a deeded basis.” She advised offering a variety of short-term products so people can test the resort experience, and see the resort improve.
With respect to staffing, she said, “make the best use of people’s time and give them tools that make them more efficient. Property-management companies have solutions that help centralize things that are easy to take away from the on-site people, and free up their time to do things that you can’t centralize. I can’t centralize a face-to-face check-in with a guest and an owner. I can’t centralize housekeeping. I can’t centralize maintenance, but I can centralize chasing dues payments for owners, doing mailings of assessments. I can centralize rentals and reservations.”
Efficient technology tools, she said, are another key element. “Our front-desk system has taken the training time for front-desk people from multiple weeks down to two to three days. It’s a first-generation cloud-based system, so it’s more intuitive.”
Technology tools for housekeeping and maintenance can assign rooms to the housekeepers, report when a room is cleaned, send photos of maintenance issues to a maintenance person, and keep track of multiple instances of a problem, indicating a need for replacement instead of repair. Such tracking, she said, also enables a resort to consolidate those portions of a property that can still function as a timeshare, while converting other portions to another use.
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