One Bedroom- Caribbean
What set Capital Vacations apart, Douglas says, was a combination of industry expertise, financial capability, and an attitude toward the property that felt genuinely optimistic rather than opportunistic.“ Capital saw the potential in this building a lot more than what I got from some of the others,” he says.“ I felt some of the others might have led us down the path of bankruptcy. Capital had a vision. They saw a future here. Total dismantling and repurposing of the property was not on the table for them.”
The moment that crystallized the partnership came when the resort was working toward a partial reopening of the top three floors. Floors five, six, and seven were approximately 70 % complete, and the board had been working with the fire marshal toward a partial opening. Then came an unexpected requirement: the fourth floor had to be built out as a fire buffer for the upper floors, adding $ 60,000 in construction costs that the association did not have. At the same time, contract negotiations with Capital Vacations were growing more serious.
Capital Vacations approved $ 150,000 in emergency financing, even before we had finalized our agreements. The timing was extraordinary.“ The day we received that funding was the day we had checks going out that would have bounced,” Douglas says.“ Insurance, power— those bills were due. We got the money from Capital on the same day we needed to mail those checks. It was a true blessing.”
A Partnership Built on Expertise and Trust
Capital Vacations brought a myriad of industry experts to join our core Board members, including Douglas Vice President Denise Mentzer and Treasurer Amy Kolis. Douglas describes the help as the arrival of a team he had been missing for years.
“ I finally had people around me who knew this industry,” he says.“ Before, we were doing everything on our own without the knowledge base to do it right. Having Capital’ s people there took so much off my plate— not just the tasks, but the input into the decisionmaking as well. These were people who actually knew what they were talking about.”
He speaks with particular appreciation for the Capital Vacations executives who engaged directly with the Maverick’ s recovery from the very beginning. Co- President Travis Bary provided senior leadership throughout the transition process. Matt Eisenberger, a Senior Vice President at Capital Vacations, was a consistent point of contact and a driving force in the early stages of the partnership. Jeff Benjamin, a senior executive, brought rigorous financial analysis to the recovery— restructuring contractor payment schedules, modeling future cash-flow challenges, and working through every number with the kind of discipline the board had lacked on its own.
“ We worked with them nights and weekends— whatever it took,” Douglas says.“ They flew down to the resort, walked the property with us, and got into the details. For a company of Capital’ s size to send that level of executive engagement to help dig us out of this hole— that really meant something. It was one of the things that separated them from everyone else we talked to.”
The partnership extended well beyond the financial rescue. Capital Vacations overhauled the resort’ s website, integrating owner portals and online reservation systems. They brought in construction oversight specialists to monitor contractor timelines and flag problems before they became costly. They stepped into the communications work that Douglas had been shouldering largely alone, helping craft the owner updates that had always been a priority but had never had the professional infrastructure behind them.
“ Working with Capital’ s team on our owner communications has been a huge improvement,” Douglas says.“ More consistent, more professional, more useful for our owners. That matters.”
Ownership Options: The Best of Both Worlds
One of the more complex aspects of the Capital Vacations partnership involved reconciling the resort’ s traditional ownership structure with Capital’ s pointsbased system. The Maverick had always operated on deeded, fixed-week ownership— a model Douglas himself grew up with and genuinely values. Capital Vacations, as a modern vacation ownership company, operates on a flexible points platform that allows owners to travel to multiple destinations at varying times of year.