Thursday, September 08, 2005

Sands Ocean Club by owner

The Sands Ocean Club Resort in Myrtle Beach is home to perhaps the most popular public oceanfront beach bar, Ocean Annies. Because of its popularity, accomodations at the Sands Ocean club are always highly demanded. We at 1st Choice Condos are able to offer you quality accomodations at the Sands for 20-40% less than the advertised rates at the resort. Your experience is essentially the same, with very few exceptions. We pride ourselves on cleanliness and overall customer focus. To learn more about us, to check availability of our units, to see our rates and many pictures of all 7 of our privately owned condos at the Sands Ocean Club, please visit our website at http://www.myrtlecondosforless.com/

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Hey Sands Ocean Club Owners

We've been receiving a number of phone calls lately from condo owners at the Sands indicating dissatisfaction with their current rental management companies (no names mentioned). They've been asking us to manage their properties. To this point 1stChoiceCondos.com has always been about advertising properties that we own, and we have always turned down opportunities to manage others. We are now hearing your voices in greater numbers and are actually considering offerring the service to a limited number of owners.

If you're interested, please contact us at 330-854-4579 to discuss the possibility.

And as always, please visit us at http://www.myrtlecondosforless.com/

We've been indexed!

Well, now I suppose I'll have to try to keep up with some content on these pages as this blog has now been indexed on the major search engines.

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Sands Ocean Club Management

I read an article yesterday that announced that 1100 units controlled by Sands Resort Holdings are going to be managed by a company out of Cleveland. Because the Sands Ocean Club rental assets were recently acquired from Sands Resort Holdings, but they continue to use a common website to advertise, it is unclear to me whether this new arrangement will impact business at the Sands Ocean Club Resort. Coincidentally, 1st Choice Condos continues to receive solicitations from owners at the Sands who are dissatisfied with their current rental management results and they are asking us to manage for them. 1st Choice Condos has always turned these requests away in the past, but is considering whether to open its doors to 3rd party owners.

One thing is for sure - 1st Choice Condos will continue to provide excellent accomodations at significantly discounted prices. Be sure to visit us at http://www.myrtlecondosforless.com/

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Where to?

So we'd like to hear from vacationers? Where should 1st Choice Condos spring up next?

  1. Orlando?
  2. Florida Beaches? (please specify)
  3. Gatlinburg?
  4. Branson?
  5. Sandusky?
  6. other?
Please Post your comments...

Who we are

1st Choice Condos is a family owned business that fcuses on the Vacation Rental industry. We did not set out to create a business, it simply eveolved. You see in 2002, while vacationing in Myrtle Beach, I picked up a real estate magazine at the grocery store for my wife. She noticed a listing in the resort next door to where we were staying. We had always dreamed of staying there, but it was a little out of our price range. The real estate listing was for less than what I expected. I knew what the resort charged its guest to rent and quickly realized there might be an opportunity to own a property and to break even on it through rentals.

We brought the idea to our family members, who became excited about the idea. We all liked the idea of owning property at the beach, and the idea of sharing the risk of ownership.

Shortly thereafter we learned of some additional costs that we had not considered, such as Home Owners Association dues, and rental commissions. Much to our surprise, the HOA fees were going to be another 30-40% on top of our mortgage payment. And an even bigger surprise was that the on-site rental company charged a 46% commission on all rentals.

We almost reconsidered, but then we decided to take a leap of faith and try our hand at managing the rental business ourselves. We developed a strategy to lower prices for our guests, while at the same time improving our bottom line and building customer loyalty.

Our next lesson was that our advertising costs would eat us alive if we continued to manage a single unit on our own. It was then that we decided to buy more condos to spread out our advertising costs.

It hasn't been easy, but somehow we've managed to keep our head above water.

We don't intend to ever become a giant company, but we will continue to look for opportunities to build on our success in the vacation real estate business, both in and around Myrtle Beach, as well as other popular tourist destinations.

In another message I'll ask you to tell us where you'd like to see us grow.

Dave Fletcher
1st Choice Condos
http://www.myrtlecondosforless.com/
Sands Ocean Club Resort by owner

Sands Ocean Club Resort owner BLOG

Welcome, and thanks for visiting. I have created this blog for 4 reasons...

1) To give my peers (other homeowners at the Sands Ocean Club Resort) a forum to actively discuss issues realated to home ownership at the resort.

2) To give my customers a public forum to document their experience with us at the Sands

3) To give other Sands customers a forum to document their experience as guest of the Sands Ocean Club

4) To further communicate the mission of 1st Choice Condos to reduce our customers' vacation cost, while providing the same or better quality accomodations at the Sands Ocean Club Resort in Myrtle Beach, SC.

I look forward to interacting with you all in the days to come.

Sincerely,

Dave Fletcher
1st Choice Condos
http://www.myrtlecondosforless.com
Sands Ocean Club Resort by owner

Sands Ocean Club Resort BLOG Test post #2

As a bloggin newbie, I'm expirimenting with publishing the blog on our main site at http://www.myrtlecondosforless.com/

Obviously it' snot going well so far....