Merlin Property Management System: A New Way Forward for Legacy Timeshare Resorts
Welcome to a Different Approach
We understand the unique challenges facing HOA-managed timeshare resorts today. Your board members are volunteers working hard to protect owner interests, manage limited budgets, and keep your property competitive in a changing market. That’s why we’ve designed a solution specifically with legacy resorts in mind—one that removes the barriers of high upfront costs and instead aligns our success with yours.
This article outlines our special program for single-site, legacy timeshare resorts that are HOA-managed and no longer actively selling new intervals. If that describes your resort, you’ll find we’ve created an arrangement designed to help you succeed without straining your operating budget.
Is This Program Right for Your Resort?
This program is designed for resorts that fit the following profile:
Your resort is a single-site property with established ownership, no longer engaged in active developer sales. The property is governed and managed by your Homeowners’ Association, with board members elected from among the owners. You’re looking for better technology to manage operations, improve owner services, and generate additional revenue through rentals and resales—but you need a solution that won’t burden your maintenance fee budget with expensive licensing costs.
If this sounds like your resort, read on. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what we’re offering.
How We Make This Work
Traditional property management systems come with hefty upfront costs and ongoing monthly licensing fees based on your unit count. For a board managing a tight budget, these costs can be prohibitive. We’ve taken a different approach.
Instead of charging expensive licensing fees, we’ve structured our revenue model around helping you generate new income. We provide you with modern web-based tools for owner rentals, resales, auctions, and exchanges. When these tools help you generate revenue, we take a small percentage. When you don’t use them, you pay nothing beyond basic support. It’s that simple.
This approach means our interests are directly aligned with yours. We succeed when you succeed. We’re invested in making sure the tools work well, because our revenue depends on it. And you get enterprise-level property management software without the enterprise-level price tag.
The Investment Structure
Let’s talk specifics. Here’s exactly what this program involves:
Setup and Training: Complimentary
We will set up the Merlin system for your resort, configure it for your specific needs, upload your existing data, and train your staff at no charge. This normally represents a significant investment, but we’re waiving these fees entirely for qualifying legacy HOA resorts.
Monthly Licensing Fees: None
There are no monthly licensing fees based on your unit count or membership size. This is the most significant difference from traditional property management systems, and it can represent substantial savings for your resort.
Monthly Support
You will need to contract for basic support services at a monthly rate, which provides you with 5 hours of dedicated support time. This covers system questions, minor adjustments, report generation, and general technical assistance.
For your first six months, any support time beyond these 5 hours is provided free of charge—we call this unlimited support during your onboarding period. After six months, additional support beyond your contracted hours is available at an hourly rate. Starting in the second year, if you choose to operate without a support contract, hourly support rates will apply.
The reality is that most established resorts find 5 hours per month to be sufficient once they’re up and running. And having unlimited support during your first six months means you won’t have to worry about extra costs while your team is learning the system.
Transaction-Based Revenue Sharing—Only When You Earn Income
This is where our model really differs from traditional systems. We provide you with powerful web-based applications for generating revenue, and we only charge when these applications actually produce income for your resort. Here’s how it breaks down:
Rental Income
When you rent out owner-deposited weeks through the tools we provide, we charge a percentage of the rental income generated. The percentage varies based on how the booking comes in:
Through Major Online Travel Agencies (OTAs): If we connect you to platforms like Booking.com or Expedia through our channel manager, and a booking comes through those platforms, we charge a small percentage of the rental income. These platforms give you massive distribution and professional marketing reach that would be impossible to achieve on your own. You will also be charged a commission by the OTA.
Through Your Resort’s Website: If someone books through the rental application we build for your resort’s own website, we charge a modest percentage of the rental income. This is your direct channel, and our fee is very reasonable compared to what most online travel agencies charge.
Through the Merlin World Platform: If someone books through the Merlin World website, where we market multiple participating resorts together like an OTA, we charge a percentage of the rental income. This platform provides marketing and exposure that individual resorts couldn’t afford to create independently and costs significantly less than traditional OTAs.
The key point: You only pay these fees when you actually collect rental income. If owners aren’t depositing weeks for rental, or if inventory doesn’t rent out, you pay nothing.
Resale and Auction Income
Many legacy resorts struggle with owners who want to exit their ownership but face limited resale options. We provide web-based resale and auction tools that help facilitate these transactions. When a resale or auction transaction completes through the tools connected to your website or through the Merlin World platform, we charge a percentage of the sale price—you only pay when a transaction actually closes.
Exchange Program
We operate an inter-resort exchange program where owners can exchange their week at your resort for a week at another participating resort. This adds significant value to your ownership and helps you compete with larger exchange companies. When exchanges happen, we share a portion of the exchange fee revenue with your resort for both inbound exchanges (people coming to your resort) and outbound exchanges (your owners going elsewhere). This creates a new revenue stream that most legacy resorts don’t currently have.
Mini-Vacations
Mini-vacations (short-stay bookings or last-minute inventory utilization) can be booked through a dedicated application. When these generate income through your website or through Merlin World, we charge a percentage. This gives you a way to monetize shoulder season or last-minute availability.
Credit Card Processing
We provide integrated credit card processing through secure APIs with major banks and payment processors. This integration is continuously maintained and updated to meet the latest security standards and technology requirements. For transactions processed through these integrated systems, we charge a small percentage of the transaction value. This covers the ongoing cost of maintaining, securing, and updating these payment integrations—work that would otherwise fall on your resort to manage separately.
What This Means for Your Budget
Let’s put this in perspective with a real-world example. Imagine your resort has 200 units. With traditional property management software, you might pay significant setup fees, substantial monthly licensing fees, and ongoing support contracts—totaling tens of thousands of dollars in the first year alone.
With our program, your guaranteed costs are dramatically lower. Everything else you might pay is directly tied to the revenue you’re generating—revenue that in many cases wouldn’t exist without the tools we’re providing.
What You Get
The Merlin system isn’t a stripped-down version or a “lite” edition. You get the complete, full-featured property management platform, including:
- Complete reservation and occupancy management with owner and guest tracking, automated confirmations, and calendar management
- Financial management with accounts receivable, maintenance fee billing, assessment tracking, and integrated credit card processing
- An owner services portal where owners can view their account, make payments, submit maintenance requests, and manage their reservations
- Rental management with online booking, channel manager integration to OTAs, and automated revenue distribution
- Resale and auction platforms to help owners who want to exit their ownership
- Exchange program participation with other resorts in the Merlin World network
- Mini-vacation booking system to monetize last-minute inventory
- Comprehensive reporting for board meetings, financial statements, and operational analytics
- Document management for owner communications, board minutes, and policies
All of this is cloud-based, accessible from anywhere, and continuously updated with new features and security improvements. Your staff doesn’t need to manage servers or worry about software updates—we handle all of that.
There Is One Requirement
To qualify for this structure, your resort needs to participate in the Merlin World program and implement both the rental and resale applications. This requirement exists because that’s how we generate revenue under this model. We’re essentially betting on helping you create new income streams rather than charging you fixed fees regardless of whether you benefit.
For most HOA boards, this isn’t a burden—it’s an opportunity. Owner rentals can generate revenue to offset operating costs. Resale tools help owners who want to exit, which reduces delinquencies. The exchange program adds value that helps with owner satisfaction. These are things you probably want to offer anyway; we just require that you use our tools to provide them.
Program Availability
This program is available exclusively for US Independently-Managed Legacy Timeshare Resorts.
Additional Details
Sales Contracts:
While your resort isn’t actively in sales, if you do occasionally process an ownership transfer or developer buyback, there are no per-contract fees for using the sales module. This is included at no additional charge.
Custom Web Development: If you want to build custom applications using Merlin’s web services APIs, that would be subject to separate negotiation and isn’t part of this standard program. However, the pre-built web applications for rentals, resales, exchanges, and mini-vacations are included and should meet the needs of most legacy resorts.
Why We Can Offer This
You might be wondering how we can offer enterprise-level software with complimentary setup and no licensing fees. It’s a fair question, and the answer is straightforward: we’ve built a scalable, cloud-based platform that costs us relatively little to add each new resort, and we’re betting that the transaction-based revenue from helping you generate income will more than make up for waiving the traditional fees.
This isn’t charity and it isn’t too good to be true. It’s a calculated business decision on our part. We believe the rental, resale, and exchange markets for legacy resorts are significantly underserved. We’re confident that we can help you tap into revenue that isn’t currently being captured. And we’re willing to align our revenue model with that belief.
If we’re right, everyone benefits. You get modern property management tools without straining your budget, and you generate new revenue streams. We participate in that revenue. If we’re wrong and the tools don’t generate significant income, you haven’t lost much—you’ve still got the property management system for just the support costs.
Next Steps
If this program interests you, here’s what we recommend:
Schedule a demonstration so your board or management committee can see the system in action and ask questions. We can show you how other legacy resorts are using the platform and what results they’re seeing.
Review with your board and any financial advisors to ensure everyone understands the structure and the opportunities it creates.
Move forward with implementation. If you decide to proceed, we’ll work with you to create an implementation timeline that minimizes disruption to your current operations. Most implementations can be completed within 90 days from contract signing to going live.
We understand that changing property management systems is a significant decision for any resort. That’s why we’ve structured this program to minimize your financial risk while maximizing your potential benefit. We’re confident enough in the value we can provide that we’re willing to align our revenue with your success.
The Bottom Line
For HOA board members trying to protect owner interests and manage limited budgets, this represents a genuine opportunity to modernize your operations without a major capital investment. You get to deploy better technology, improve owner services, create new revenue opportunities, and do it all for a fraction of what traditional systems would cost.
We’d welcome the opportunity to discuss how this could work for your specific resort. Every property is unique, and we’re happy to answer questions about how the Merlin system would integrate with your current operations and what kind of results you might expect.
Thank you for taking the time to review this information. We look forward to the possibility of working with you and your resort.
Let’s start a conversation
To learn more or to schedule a demonstration, please contact:
Mike Ashton, SVP Resort Partnerships
246-230-4982
mikea@quickmerling.com
Merlin: The New Way Forward for Legacy Resorts