DVC Cabins sales are a miss *update 10.16*

The day after it was announced I had a call from my guide. I told him to add me that day. He's been great and never bugged me about other resorts knowing.

I am not as bad as some. I already own at PVB. This is just to get me from 1 bedrooms to 2 every other year. Nothing is a need. A new June UY came up this morning but it's Bee Thaxton's business. I cannot stand her. Still pondering though.

Sorry there is so much negative comments .
I am getting ready to check in today and am so excited about everything the Fort has to offer.
Including the golf carts.
If you stay there just once you will understand firsthand why the maintenance fees are going to be high .
That location is not easy to keep rustic apparently.
I guarantee there will be a day when we all wish we had bought a piece of the Wilderness that Walt Disney personally wanted for his guests to experience !
Just add it to the long list of vacations that you are not going to experience any where else.

I do agree they made a mistake with the Cabin design. 

I do understand and have been all over the place with similar thoughts and can be quite negative about Disney frequently.
I just hope my grandchildren will enjoy it someday … They are already traveling around the World with parents
Perhaps they will scoff at the cabins especially since they stayed in an AirStream at a National Park!
Oh well .
I just have to believe the renovation and modern aesthetic will create a love for Nature and the responsibility for a Future .
Hopefully it is not too late .

Sounds crazy but I wish it would rain this trip in the Cabins for something different .
And we need rain ..

The old cabins are for sale on the open market.  I've looked at them several times, as the nostalgia of having authentic former Disney Fort Wilderness Cabins at Standing Pines tugs at me.  But these used cabins are going for $50,000 each.  That's a lot for something that may well have been considered at end of life for a Disney property. For more or less the same cost as an used FW cabin after shipping costs are added, we could buy a brand new, two-bedroom actual log cabin.   Here's my current favorite vendor.  If you want to play with simple yet very effective floorplan ideas for these cabins, they have several to explore.  

Back to the used FW cabins - based on a number of conversations, I think Disney sold off the used cabins to essentially wholesalers who are then marking up the price.  So I very much doubt Disney sold them for the $50k each.  I suspect WDW was much more interested in working with a company large enough to remove these on the Disney timeline.  

And that brings me back to the dealbreaker for me for buying CFW.  I would love to own at the campground.  But when basic napkin math suggests that the MFs for one cabin equate to buying a brand new cabin every single year, I just can't get there. 

I very much suspect Fort Wilderness has been a cash cow for Disney for decades. Just for the sake of illustration, let's suppose that FW has 800 campsites plus 400 cabins, with 350 of the cabins transitioning to DVC.  Just to keep the math simple, let's suppose the cabins used to go for an average of $400 per night and the campsites an average of $100 per night.  So rental income alone for the campground at say 80% average occupancy would be: (($400 * 400)+($100 * 800)*365)/(365*80%) = $70,080,000, excluding any additional revenue such as merch sales, activity fees, etc.  Converting 350 of those nice revenue producing cabins drops the rental revenue for the campground to roughly $30 million per year for the remaining 50 cabins and 800 campsites.  If ancillary revenue (merch, activities, etc.) is at least 50% of revenue, that's still $45 million per year for Fort Wilderness even with all 350 DVC cabins taken out of the equation.  

Finding employment data on the Disney resorts is a challenge.  So I pulled staffing numbers from Ocean Lakes campground in Myrtle Beach, the largest campground on the East Coast.  It has 859 campsites plus 2,569 rental houses.  At the height of the summer camping season, Ocean Lakes employees a total of 550 employees for more than 3x the total number of rentals as Fort Wilderness.   So let's further assume that FW maintains 400 employees all year at an average of $100,000 per year per employee.  That's $40 million per year in staffing costs.  Other large expenses for the campground will be utilities and whatever fees they pick up as part of general WDW services (boats, roads, other infrastructure, overhead, etc).  For giggles, let's assume all in, the costs for operating Fort Wilderness is in the neighborhood of $60 million per year.  

So prior to DVC, Fort Wilderness profit may have been somewhere around $15 million per year if the long chain of assumptions above are anywhere near the right estimate.  

After DVC, the campground will need those 350 cabins to generate just over $40 million per year to bring in the same revenue as they did prior to DVC.  At roughly $50,000 per year in MFs per cabin times 350 cabins, that's $17.5 million per year in MFs.   That's a shortfall of over $23 million per year.  Sure, I would expect Disney accountants using actual real numbers of revenue and cost factored all of this into pricing the purchase price and MFs for CFW.  So together I would suspect that it offsets whatever the actual numbers have been.  

Perhaps slow sales at CFW don't matter to Disney overall.  Perhaps those unsold points / undeclared inventory of points wind up being essentially used by Disney as cash rentals pulling in approximately the same profit they did prior to DVC.  Because this whole analysis is based on high average annual occupancy.  If the cabins were not at the 80% I'm assuming, then the whole analysis changes in favor of the DVC model for the cabins.  Then, it makes much more financial sense as a business decision to move these to DVC to drive occupancy higher due to the sunk cost nature of DVC ownership.  


Here's my opinion: inflation will continue to be an issue. Once the cabins are converted to DVC, the only easy way to deal with inflation is to increase MFs. Therefore I suspect that owners at CFW will see escalating increases in MFs over time.  That's the bottom line reason I will not buy CFW points.  All the rest of this extra long post is simply entertainment.  MFs are too high and I see far too great a risk they continue rising over time.