Why the hardest job at an independent resort isn’t running it, it’s deciding who should

For most homeowners associations in America, the top complaint is landscaping. An overgrown lawn, the wrong shrubs, a neighbor who won’t trim the hedges.

For a timeshare HOA, landscaping would be a welcome problem.

According to ARDA’s 2025 State of the Industry report, owners hold roughly 80% of U.S. timeshare inventory, with developers holding 16% and HOAs 4%. But owning inventory isn’t the same as running the place. At an independent resort, operations fall to an owner board, and how those operations get handled is a decision the board itself has to make. Only about 2% of resorts are self-managed by their association. The rest contract management out, whether developer-affiliated (85%) or third-party (12%), but the decision, and the responsibility for it, sits with the board.

And what sits with that board is not shrubbery. It’s reserve studies, sunset clauses, rental programs, delinquency rates, sales initiatives, owner communications and the operational complexity of running a hospitality business, all of it, on volunteer time. When it works, it’s because the right people found each other. When it doesn’t, the damage can quietly compound for years before anyone can act.

The Long Quiet Before the Fight

At an oceanfront resort in Virginia Beach called The Colony, built in 1976, owners say it compounded for a long time. By their account, the board and the property manager had grown too close, and the arrangement had stopped serving the broader ownership base. Repairs went unmade. Records fell out of order. The only modernized units, owners later learned, belonged to a select few.

Then the owners organized. Through a grassroots effort on their Facebook group they raised more than $30,000, took legal action and reclaimed the ability to act on behalf of their own resort. The leftover money raised went straight into resort improvements. A new board came in. One board member, Lee Molaison, was so determined not to let the progress slip that he and his wife moved onto the property for three months to steer the transition themselves.

But winning that fight was not the same as running a resort. The new board had resolve and love of property. What it didn’t have was decades of timeshare operations experience, and it knew it. Knowing what you don’t know is one of the most valuable things a board can bring to the table, along with the wisdom to find who does.

The Decision Underneath the Turnaround

Here is the part that’s easy to miss inside a good comeback story: an owner board’s most consequential job is not fixing the roof. It’s deciding how the resort will be governed at all. Stay self-managed? Hire a general manager? Bring in a management company? Blend them into something custom? Every board owns that call, weighing property size, the owner base, and how much it can realistically carry in-house. The impact is greater than a single roof replacement decision – it reverberates in every capital project, daily operations and guest experience. Some get it right. Some don’t. That is business, and it is human.

At The Colony, after that years-long battle, the board chose Resort Management & Consulting Group, and chose to keep its own authority while doing it. For this board and this property, that selection became a productive partnership, the right fit for their situation.

When the Right People Find Each Other

What the board describes, since, is less a vendor relationship than a partnership. “From the moment RMCG assumed responsibilities, the board’s activities dropped from constant, day-to-day involvement to just monthly meetings,” said Argyrios Katos, The Colony’s Board President. Those meetings later became quarterly. For the first time since their years-long battle to get access to and act on behalf of their oceanfront property, board member Lee Molaison says, the board could finally stop worrying about the resort. RMCG, he adds, was the “most knowledgeable and experienced group he had ever worked with”.

It isn’t only the board that’s convinced. Since taking over daily operations in April 2025, RMCG brought operating expenses in $108,000 under budget, cleared owner accounts left long delinquent, lifted maintenance scores through routine inspections, and grew rental revenue 43% in a single year, with a further 56% gain projected for 2026. For a resort built in 1976, that last number matters most. Rental growth this late in a property’s life is evidence of operations and improvements owners and guests can feel.

And that was the cornerstone of the fit: RMCG’s leadership brings more than 127 years of timeshare-specific experience, much of it with independent, HOA-managed resorts, the exact world The Colony lives in. It wasn’t general management expertise the board needed. It was someone who already knew this niche and could navigate solutions within it rapidly, with trust in a place where trust had deteriorated. 

“Our job isn’t to take a resort away from the people who love it. It’s to sit beside a board that knows its property better than anyone, bring the industry experience they were never expected to have, and make the decisions together. We built this company on purpose, close to our resorts and close to our own people, because that’s the only way the work stays personal,” said Lanse McColl the President and CEO of RMCG. 

There’s No Single Right Structure, Only the Right Fit

None of this means every resort should do what The Colony did. The lesson isn’t a management company. It’s the match.

Timeshare is expansive enough to hold every version of the answer. Large developers run hundreds of networked properties on points, and for many owners that scale and flexibility is exactly right. Independent resorts give a loyal returning owner base the comfort of a familiar place that is truly theirs. And exchange networks like RCI stitch it all together, letting owners roam the whole spread while their home resort stays home.

Boards are made of people, and so are management companies, and people are fallible. Choosing well, together, under imperfect judgment, is genuinely hard. But the boards that get it right give their owners something powerful – a resort that holds its value, a welcome that feels familiar and a place worth the drive back. The owners at The Colony went to extraordinary lengths for the right to make that choice, and today they’re making it from their own oceanfront balconies, with a lot less to worry about.

That is what governing bodies look like when they get it right.

Kelley Ellert is the founder of Waterwheel Marketing, a hybrid consultancy and agency specializing in marketing for the vacation ownership and hospitality industry. Find her at waterwheelmarketing.com or on LinkedIn.