Happy Friday! We thought it would be nice to round out the week to go over some interesting DVC Rental Deals for 1 and 2 Bedroom Villas. Hopefully reading this will spark some endorphins to help you sail into the weekend as you dream of skipping through a discounted villa on your way to a magical day at Walt Disney World.

But before we talk about an interesting first, I’d like to provide some background – so let’s get started with a modified version of a meme I send my kids every morning on our park days.

If charts are not your thing, then feel free to scroll down a bit to the rentals table below. (But, since you are reading a Touring Plans blog post, I suspect that is not the case.)

Also, if you are a Touring Plans subscriber, you can access a weekly list of DVC Rental Deals here. If you are not yet a subscriber and enjoy both endorphins AND good deals, you can Join Touring Plans here.

It is been a little while, so let’s start with a quick primer: Dedicated DVC Rentals are rooms already booked by a Disney Vacation Club owner and are often rented out to others through one of several web sites. Over the past 18 months, I’ve tracked more than 19,000 of these rentals and found that by far, 1-night rentals are the most common – close to 29% of all rentals!

However, rentals up to a week still make up a large percentage of available listings. (Rentals longer than 7 days do pop up, but rentals 8-days or longer account for less than 2% of listings when counted all together.)

When it comes to room types – as one might expect, studios lead the pack with almost 78% of the market share. Together, 1 and 2 bedroom rentals add up to just over 20% of listings, with all of the rest of the room types accounting for less then 2%.

Get Your Endorphins Ready

One thing that has we’ve noticed over time is that every once in awhile 1 and 2 bedroom villas show up in larger batches than normal. Over the last few weeks there have been a few of these batches.

I’ve labeled some of the larger batches in the chart above – you can see that on September 30th last year was the biggest drop with about 55 larger room rentals all showing up on a single day. Back on August 16th this year we saw 30 rentals.

Opportunities

This brings us to a window where there are some excellent deals to be had!

I like to use the median price of dedicated DVC rentals recorded as a rule-of-thumb kind of measurement of how “good” the price is for any individual rental. While not a perfect measure, it can give us a birds eye view of things. Let’s say anything more than 10% below the median for any resort and room type combination is worth looking at. How many of these recent villa rentals might be good deals? Let’s check out a table…

Looking at all of the 1 and 2 bedroom villas from August to October, there have been 189 rentals that were at least 10% below median – and 137 of those were at least 20% below!

A Kidani Example

Let’s take a look at one rental that’s active right now – an Animal Kingdom Kidani 2-Bedroom Savannah View Villa for 2-nights starting 9/4

Using past data, the median price for a 2 bedroom villa at this resort is $919. That includes all dates, so let’s say I’d expect the start of September to be a little cheaper than usual. But – this median is also calculated using all 2 bedroom villas – so this one being a Savannah View makes it more valuable (and thus more expensive) to many people.

Well – this particular rental is going for $455 per night – or 52% below median price! Would you like a better visual of that info? Your hypothalamus says yes.

Here’s a scatter chart where every dot is a 2-bedroom rental at this resort. It has been filtered down to include only rentals 2-nights or longer to make it match this example.

This particular rental is living inside the red circle – way down at the low end of the price scale.

If the scatter chart doesn’t make it clear this deal is a steal, I think a line chart will. The following chart shows how many rentals for this room have appeared at each price point (grouped into $50 ranges.)

You can see the most common price point is about $1,050/night with 16 rentals. The orange vertical line is the median price of all rentals (so half are higher, half lower.) The green line WAY down on the left side is this example rental at a relatively measly $455.

SWEET SWEET ENDORPHINS

Now, as a reward for your data viewing efforts, a table CHOCK FULL of 1 and 2 Bedroom villa rentals through September priced at least 20% below median.

Pace yourself.

If you’ve scored any of these dedicated DVC rentals and are riding out a natural wave of pure joy and savings, let us know in the comments!