CLC have announced the closures of their Kusadasi International Golf Resort and Apollonium Spa and Beach Resort. According to CLC, the closures have resulted from a change in Turkish legislation which states that from 1st January 2024, any rental for less than 100 days is considered a tourism/vacation rental and can only be allowed under a permit from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
For many years, CLC has had an active estate agency division which has been selling freehold properties in many resorts. With the recent change in CLC branding, the new identity being Idiliq Developments are still selling properties on the CLC/Wyndham resorts in Turkey as may be seen from this page of their website:
This mixed use, timeshare and owner occupied properties is where the problem seems to stem from. In order to continue to operate, CLC state that they must have 100% of the properties (which are owned by individual homeowners and leased to CLC) in each resort complex to vote that they are in favour of the properties being used for short-term touristic purposes. CLC state that this is an impossibility and necessitates the closure of the resorts.
Logic dictates that if you have taken the time and expense to purchase a holiday home in Turkey, or elsewhere for that matter, you are hardly going to be happy to sign a legal document which could effectively bar you from benefitting from using your holiday home. The other point with the Turkish legislation, if we read correctly, is that an apartment will not be able to be sold to more than one person. As CLC, together with many other timeshare developers, are selling timeshare on the basis of fractional ownership, this part of the new legislation would seem to render the sale of such a product invalid.
Another thought to contend with concerns those actual property owners in the Turkish resorts who purchased on the basis that they could lease back the property to CLC to generate income. Given this news, those owners will now have had what potentially was one of the prime motivators to purchase, investment income, cut off. If that very same income was to be used to repay finance taken to purchase, then those owners may face financial fallout from the CLC decision.
TCA comment
TCA have established that there are 45 timeshare resorts, including CLC, in Turkey and as at the time of writing we are unaware of any of the other resorts either closing or making changes to ownership. Naturally if we find this is not just CLC that are suffering we will of course report.
For those who purchased CLC timeshare based on their love of Turkey, this change will be a bitter pill to swallow. For other owners, the effect will be a loss of destination thus creating less holiday choice, this of course on the coat tails of our announcement that CLC placed Trenython Manor on the market in June 2023.
For those CLC owners who have no intention of using alternative CLC destinations or resorts and have placed their future holiday plans in Turkey, will CLC offer refunds on already paid maintenance fees? We doubt it.
Now we have no idea of the number of owners with their timeshare rooted in the Turkish resorts, however no matter how many, the loss of these resorts will place further strain on an already strained booking system. Add this to the Wyndham/CLC January sale open to non owners and we can see that 2024 CLC timeshare owner bookings are heading towards a complete meltdown.
For more information regarding this article or assistance in any other timeshare related issues please contact the TCA on 01908 881058 or email: info@TimeshareConsumerAssociation.org.uk