Terms & Conditions

[vickys]

We have a claimant who has bought a timeshare in a holiday home.

Presumably the claimant only has the right to sell his timeshare, ie, the right to two weeks holiday, rather than a right to sell the property. So we do not feel we can treat this as a second property and feel it would be treated as a personal possession. Has anyone had a similar case and how did you assess for capital purposes?

I have been advised there is a commissioners decision relating to timeshare properties – can anyone advise of the commiss decision?

Thank you

[Anonymous]

The HB Guidance Manual doesn’t address this as far as I can tell. The DWP Decision Maker’s Guide (para 29580) lists assets that should be regarded as premises, and it includes “any premises in which a person has a time-share”.

I couldn’t find any decisions that mention time-share on the OSSC site (12 cases with capital as primary category and premises as secondary category).

There is one child support case on CPAG online where the word “timeshare” is used, but the issue was completely different from whether such an asset counts as “premises”.

In the absence of any other authority, I would say follow the DWP DM guide and treat as premises

[peterdelamothe]

Timeshare is just another form of holiday club. It comes in many forms – fixed weeks, a “points” system and even a lottery system to decide who gets what accommodation and when.

The term “timeshare owner” is a complete misnomer in my view; the buyer does not actually own anything. Secondly (with some exceptions) there is a very limited resale market. If someone booked a hotel room in Blackpool for the next 15 years and paid in advance, would that count as capital? 😆

So I really do not see how timeshares can count as premises or anything else and I think theyu shouyld be ignored for capital purposes … unless there is a clear CD on it.

You might want to consider deprivation of capital to buy the timeshare. Plus the impact of any income from the timeshare if it is a type that can be hired out.

[petedavies]

I think it can, and should, be counted as capital but not premises.

Your claimant has an assett which can be quantified – the right to receive an income for the property for two weeks per year. There are very few, if any, timeshares where you cannot let it out.

How to quantify it is a problem: How much will the income be for each year remaining of their ownership? What is the chances of them not being able to let it out? How much will it cost to let it out? etc etc etc.

[emm]

I has a case like this and asked the Adelphi how to treat it.

Their advice was to treat it as a capital asset- i.e get a value on it and disregard 10% for re-sell.

Hope it helps

[vickys]

Thanks for all responses.
To Emm – how did you obtain a valuation on the timeshare?
Many thanks

[emm]

luckily he had only puchased it about three months prior so we were advised to just use that figure- how you would go about valuing a much earlier purchase of course would be much harder

[Anonymous]

Hi

Attempted to value a timeshare about two years ago – astonishingly hard work to get a valuation – problem is, timeshares cannot be valued in the same way as normal property (two beds here / location etc) – simply on a what someone would pay ad hoc basis – if I remember correctly, we just used the purchase price as no time share resellers would even give us an indicitive price….did hint that resale price is FAR lower than purchase price though…

[Anonymous]

I think the decision to treat timeshare as capital might depend on the type of timeshare contract the person has.

There are two main types of contract: ‘right to use’ and ‘fractional ownership’.

Right to use means the person is paying the owner a fee in order to have a right to use the property at certain times of the year.

Fractional ownership means the person partly owns the property with a number of other people.

In my opinion, I would treat fractional ownership as capital, but not right to use.

[Author]

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