Credit card deposit after champagne and six hours pressure selling, that was their technique for the small punter buying a week’s timeshare in a one room studio. For the bigger ones interested in a three or four room unit it required a softening-up process…that was a little longer, including a quick trip on their boat around a small island, Ilet-à-Cochons, in the bay, Petit Cul-de-Sac. For those with real money to spend, it was the whole works with a mini-cruise on Castlemain’s ketch.
In Europe’s single market the largest across frontiers transaction made by most average Europeans was a holiday home, their dream home. Unfortunately for some the dream home in the sun often turned into a nightmare.
The market had been given a bad reputation by Spain in the eighties where prices were way above their real value. When the property down swing came apartments were being auctioned off on the Costa del Sol for a pittance. A great many developers went broke, only those who had the foresight to invest carefully and keep a cash reserve survived. Before sales picked up again in the late nineties developers had to overcome the bad reputation they had built up in the earlier boom.
In the eighties it was estimated that twenty percent of all deals in Spain went sour through faulty title deeds, hidden debts, lack of planning permission and essential services. That frightened away a lot of potential buyers, resulting in the French looking for something nearer home. That was easier said then done. However, with the fall in the price of air fares, the French West Indies became a good bet. The buyer was still in France, with French law, money and banks.
That was when Amadis and his company Caribbean Property Development miraculously recovered after hovering on the verge of bankruptcy. At first, when the tropical hurricane ‘Bertha’ had swept across the island causing havoc and destruction on a scale that had not been experienced in living memory, it had appeared to accentuate their problems, but when the French government declared the hurricane a ‘natural disaster’ it was a gift from heaven.
It was with the reconstruction and substantial aid that the French government gave the island Amadis seized the opportunity, he received very substantial compensation for the damage done to his unsold apartments and holiday villas. He had many well placed friends who facilitated a more than generous compensation for the damage, real and invented. He restarted by building his first timeshares with the aid of the Canadian timeshare operator, Worldwide Leisure Homes, who had a major base in Miami for the North American market.
The concept was simple, a holiday home was too expensive for most, but it was not impossible for the average salaried Joe to consider buying a share in a holiday home. One or two weeks a year, at a fraction of the price it would cost to fully own an apartment or a house.
Once the legal complications had been ironed out by the lawyers it became easy to sell the idea. However, there were many difficulties which were carefully played done by the promoters, whose sole interest, in many cases, was to sell their development as quickly as possible and move onto the next project
Timeshares were sold using high pressure sales techniques, amounting in certain cases to extortion by unscrupulous promoters. Timeshare companies were often registered in tax havens such as the Channel Islands in Europe or the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, these were based on a fragile trustee system. It had been described as a Timeshare bomb waiting to go off by a British reporter during the property boom of the late eighties. It went off as he had predicted, with developers going bankrupt, leaving thousands of timesharers without their holidays of a lifetime.
The Timeshare industry operated in a legal vacuum with only Britain’s 1992 Timeshare Act providing any real protection for consumers. The European Union’s Timeshare directive then gave a mandatory cooling-off period. It introduced rules and defined how companies should operate.
In the eighties the corruption in the Spanish property sector was widespread, with hundreds of properties being built without planning permission. The building quality was often poor. Those who complained were threatened and bullied by developers.
Often developers took out a second mortgage on the property which was hidden from the buyer. Under Spanish law it became the new owner’s debt, who could not get the deeds to the property until it was paid.
The laws in Guadeloupe, though being French and in line with those of the EU, were as extensive as those of the USA, where their laws had cleared the sunshine states of real estate and timeshare crooks, making it a fast growing market for certain European countries.
Though Florida had many advantages it could not compete with the European environment in the ex-colonial Caribbean islands, in spite of the high quality of its homes, the prices in Florida had become too high, and bad press gave a poor image of the state with the violence that had sometimes effected foreigners.
The French preferred to be in a French speaking environment, the Dutch in their former territories like Sint Maarten, and the British in Bermuda or the Bahamas
Chapter 33
Guadeloupe
Offshore Islands Page 32
