Membership resorts finance themselves in an order that is unusual for hotel development. Memberships go on sale once construction starts, and over the roughly 30 months to opening the operator builds up contracts equivalent to the project cost. Unlike typical hotel development, which relies on bank loans, mezzanine finance or a sale to a REIT, here customers are buying a building before it is finished. This article breaks the structure down, checking each figure against the investor-relations materials of Resorttrust (リゾートトラスト, TSE 4681). Deferred revenue for the company’s three unopened Sanctuary Court properties totalled ¥59.4bn at the end of March 2026, and at Sanctuary Court Nikko, which opened in February 2026, the ¥37.4bn real-estate portion was recognised as revenue in one lump at opening. We then list the six membership properties (605 rooms) whose openings we could confirm, compare the estimated settled ADR of Ise-Shima, Hakone, Nasu, Tateshina, Atami and other areas where membership properties cluster with the per-night cost of a membership, and set out where the exit (the resale market) and rebuilding costs sit.

Building with memberships: selling after groundbreaking and recovering the project cost before opening

Resorttrust’s investor document “Resorttrust’s Business Model (February 2026)” sets out the standard shape of a single membership hotel as follows. Assuming a hotel of about 180 rooms, it offers some 8,000 memberships, with 45 people sharing each room. The guideline total project cost starts at around ¥60bn per property, and total membership sales start at around ¥130bn — a sales total set at 2.0–2.3 times the whole project cost. Sales begin after construction starts; the design is to sell about half in the roughly 30 months from groundbreaking to opening, recovering the capital invested, and to sell out within 2–3 years of opening.

In other words, because total sales are set at 2.0–2.3 times the project cost, by the time half is sold, contracts equivalent to 100–115% of the project cost have built up. Per room, that is a project cost of about ¥330M against total sales of about ¥720M. In typical hotel development what builds up during construction is the loan balance; in this model it is money received from customers.

The way payments are received is distinctive too. In the same document’s example, the membership price is made up of three parts — a guarantee deposit (10–20%), a registration fee (35–40%) and the real-estate price (45–50%) — and 50% of the price is received at contract, 75% at topping-out and 100% at completion. The accounting does not follow the cash. The registration fee is booked as revenue at contract; the guarantee deposit is recorded as a liability and amortised into revenue after opening (over 30 or 50 years for products from around 2000 onward); and the real-estate price is deferred until opening and booked as revenue in one lump then. In the example of a ¥10M membership, only the ¥4M registration fee is booked as revenue at contract, and the ¥5M real-estate price is booked at opening together with ¥3.5M of cost of sales. The example annual fee is ¥130,000.

We checked how this deferral shows up in the results using the property-level revenue breakdown in the presentation for the fiscal year ended March 2026. Deferred revenue for the three Sanctuary Court properties still unopened at year-end was ¥17.9bn for Yatsugatake (¥17.0bn in FY3/2025 + ¥0.9bn in FY3/2026), ¥26.8bn for Kanazawa (¥0.6bn + ¥26.2bn) and ¥14.7bn for Awajishima (FY3/2026), a cumulative ¥59.4bn. Nikko, which opened in February 2026, realised ¥37.4bn of real-estate revenue in one lump in the same year. The breakdown of that year’s deferral adjustments shows ¥41.781bn of real-estate revenue newly deferred and ¥37.480bn realised on opening, so the build-up of deferrals and the realisation at opening roughly balanced out. The company cites “the impact of deferral realisation” as its reason for switching its dividend policy from a payout ratio to DOE (dividend on equity), precisely because reported revenue swings this much depending on whether a property opens.

The depth of the member base can also be confirmed in the numbers. Group members held a total of 205,000 memberships (end-March 2025); excluding multiple holdings, that is about 145,000 people (130,000 households). By end-March 2026 memberships had risen to 210,752, of which Sanctuary Court accounted for 22,760 (+5,264 year on year). Hotel membership contracts for the year came to ¥122.1bn, about 16% above the previous year. The company says more than 80% of contracts each year come from referrals, additional purchases and switches by existing members, and this referral-centred sales network underpins its funding through advances received.

What works compared with bank loans, preferred equity and REIT acquisition

How membership funding works shows up in the make-up of the liabilities. On the consolidated balance sheet at end-March 2026, borrowings (short and long term combined) were just ¥6.1bn, while advances received reached ¥107.8bn and long-term deposits received ¥149.7bn. Advances received include the real-estate portion for unopened hotels (¥55.0bn per the company’s explanation at end-March 2025), which is transferred to revenue at opening. Neither carries interest, and together with net assets of ¥166.7bn they make clear a funding structure that does not depend on interest-bearing debt.

The table below sets out, for each provider of development capital, the leverage, interest-rate sensitivity and where construction risk sits. The membership model stands out because it is barely affected by rising interest rates and because most of the funds can be secured through sales before completion. In exchange, the operator bears all of the risk of slow sales and construction cost overruns. Because the sale price is fixed at contract, cost overruns have to be absorbed in the operator’s margin. The company’s step-by-step price revisions since FY2022, even for properties already on sale, can be seen as a way of passing cost increases on to members who sign later.

The distance from REIT acquisition is also worth noting. Among the names of the 302 properties held by seven listed hotel REITs in the ownership data maintained by HotelBank (as of September 14, 2026) — Ichigo Hotel REIT (3463), Invincible Investment Corporation (8963), Nippon Hotel & Residential Investment Corporation (3472), Japan Hotel REIT (8985), Hoshino Resorts REIT (3287), Mori Trust REIT (8961) and Kasumigaseki Hotel REIT (401A) — there is no property of a membership resort brand. Membership properties, in which members hold usage rights and a share of the real estate, differ in character from what REITs valuing assets on rent acquire, and their exit lies in the membership resale market instead.

Supply pipeline: six membership properties, 605 rooms, due to open

The unopened membership resorts whose opening date and room count could be confirmed in each company’s IR materials and press releases are the following six properties with 605 rooms. Resorttrust plans to open four properties by 2029, starting with Yatsugatake in March 2027; as of end-June 2026, Kanazawa was 55.6% sold, Awajishima 25.5%, and Sotobo Suzumejima, which went on sale on June 22, 11.4%. On Awaji Island, the number of lodging facilities has grown 1.4-fold over the past few years. Tokyu Land Corporation plans to open two properties of its Tokyu Harvest Club membership resort hotels in Kusatsu at the same time, a main building and an annex.

This table includes only projects whose opening date and room count could be confirmed in primary sources. In its development schedule, Resorttrust says it will keep to “a pace of roughly 1 to 1.5 properties a year from FY2026 onward” and that it is “considering more than 10 new candidate sites from FY2026 onward”. Its materials for Q1 of the fiscal year ending March 2027 also disclosed that it signed purchase agreements for two hotel development sites in the Kyushu area in May and August 2026. Their names and opening years have not been announced, however, so they are not included in the table. After Kanazawa in March 2029, the gap between large openings also widens. The company itself explains that growth in operating rooms, the denominator of its occupancy rate, will level off for the time being.

Distance from the open market: estimated settled ADR in seven municipalities vs per-night cost

We measured open-market rates in areas where membership properties cluster using MetroEngines Research’s municipal data. The targets are the municipalities home to XIV Toba (Toba City), XIV Hakone Rikyu and Tokyu Harvest Club Hakone Koshien (Hakone Town), Tokyu Harvest Club Nasu (Nasu Town), XIV Tateshina and Tokyu Harvest Club Tateshina (Chino City), XIV Hatsushima and Tokyu Harvest Club Atami Izusan (Atami City) and others, plus the planned opening sites. Tokyu Harvest Club’s published property list alone shows 3 properties with 223 rooms in Chino City, 4 with 281 rooms in Hakone Town, 2 with 156 rooms in Nasu Town and 2 with 182 rooms in Atami City, so membership rooms make up part of each area’s supply.

For estimated settled ADR, only the seven municipalities with at least 30 target properties (N) in every month were used for comparison. The 12-month average for September 2025 to August 2026 was highest in Hakone Town at ¥26,400 (N=170–187), followed by Atami City at ¥24,600 (N=99–108), Toba City at ¥20,800 (N=74–81) and Nasu Town at ¥19,900 (N=49–54). Shima City came to ¥18,300 (N=55–59), Kusatsu Town ¥17,600 (N=77–92) and Chino City ¥12,600 (N=37–41). Hokuto City (N=19–23) and Isumi City (N=3) have too few properties in the estimated settled ADR population, so they are excluded from the comparison, and the 12-month average of listed prices (area median, tax-inclusive) is shown as a reference instead: ¥28,700 for Hokuto City and ¥48,500 for Isumi City.

In August 2026, estimated settled ADR was below the same month a year earlier in six of the seven municipalities, all except Chino City. Membership rates, however, are often fixed year-round as member room charges, so movements in open-market rates do not pass straight through to members. Lodging taxes are also being introduced or considered in Hakone Town and Nasu Town (Hakone’s ¥350 lodging tax, and Nasu Town’s lodging tax, in force from October 1).

Next, we estimate the per-night cost of a membership. The baseline is the Club Suite 8-nights-a-year type at Sanctuary Court Kanazawa (¥9.79M, tax-inclusive) and the ¥130,000 annual fee the company’s materials give as an example for a ¥10M membership. Assuming 20 years held, all 8 nights used each year and zero exit value, the purchase price allocation is ¥61,200 a night and the annual fee ¥16,300 a night, for a total of about ¥77,400. That cost is 2.9 times Hakone Town’s estimated settled ADR of ¥26,400. Memberships are tax-inclusive and estimated settled ADR is a tax-exclusive equivalent, so even after removing the tax difference (about 10%) it is 2.7 times. On top of this come member room charges (¥18,000–22,500 a night for a one-bedroom at Sanctuary Court Nikko; ¥21,780–27,225 including tax and service).

Varying both axes makes the character of the product clear. The lightest cost is ¥57,042 for 30 years held with all 8 nights used each year, and even that is 2.2 times Hakone Town’s estimated settled ADR. Conversely, holding for 10 years and using only 4 nights a year sends it up to ¥277,250 (10.5x). Only four cells in the table come in at a multiple in the 2x range — holds of 25 years or more with 7–8 nights a year fully used — and as long as exit value is set at zero, there is no combination in which a new membership’s per-night cost matches the rate level of the open market. Working backwards, for Case B (20 years, 8 nights a year) to match Hakone’s ADR, 83.4% of the purchase price must be recovered at exit. The gap to the 30% assumed in Case D shows how large the unrecoverable portion of the new-sale price — the registration fee and so on — is.

The differences between cases say a lot. Cutting nights used from 8 to 6 a year alone pushes the per-night cost up to ¥103,300, so the economics of a membership depend more on usage than on the holding period. On the other hand, setting exit value at 30% of the purchase price brings the per-night cost down to ¥59,100. Resale-market prices are the other variable that determines the effective cost of use. According to the company, 85% of new buyers at Kanazawa and 88% at Awajishima are corporate contracts, and buyers value memberships including their use for employee benefits, client entertainment and tax purposes. That value, which this article’s estimate does not capture, is part of why sales keep growing even though the per-night cost is 2–4 times the open-market ADR.

Exit: resale-market liquidity and who pays for rebuilding

The exit for a membership is the resale market. In material explaining the purchase value of its memberships, Resorttrust states plainly that “a resale market exists”. At the same time, its membership sales information stipulates that transfer becomes possible 5 years after completion (or 3 years after the contract date if the contract was signed more than 2 years after completion). So there is not yet any resale price for the Sanctuary Court properties due to open. For its existing brands, the company itself resells: XIV is “nearly sold out (resale)” and Bay Court Club is “sold out (resale)”.

Resale prices range from around ¥1M to over ¥15M depending on the property’s generation, location and room grade. The relationship with the annual fee is especially telling. In the table above, asking prices range from about 10–13 times the annual fee (XIV Hamanako, Toba Bettei) to more than 50 times (Tokyo Bay Court Club). For memberships whose resale price is around ten years’ worth of annual fees, buyers can be read as weighing the ongoing upkeep more heavily than the purchase price. As Case R shows, the per-night cost via the resale market falls below Toba City’s estimated settled ADR of ¥20,800 (room charges extra). New-sale prices are set at a “new-build, at-opening value” that includes the unrecoverable registration fee; resale prices can be seen as values reset by subsequent usage value and upkeep costs.

Tokyu Harvest Club uses a small-owner system limiting each room to 12 (or 10) members, issues 30 (or 36) accommodation vouchers a year, and allows membership to be transferred and inherited. According to operator Tokyu Resorts & Stay, the annual number of membership transactions in FY2025 hit a record high for the third year running, with the most trades at Hakone Koshien, Hamanako, Amagi Kogen and Nasu. The mechanics differ by brand, but this is evidence that the resale market works as an exit for existing properties.

Finally, who pays for rebuilding and major renovation? Resorttrust’s development schedule has, separately from new properties, rows for “partial renovation of existing facilities (strategic investment)” and “remodel development / preparation and study toward membership structuring”, and its long-term growth outline places “launch of XIV rebuilding model” in the phase from the fiscal year ending March 2030 to the one ending March 2035. This suggests rebuilding is positioned as development integrated with structuring new memberships. However, the treatment of existing members’ holdings and the split of costs have not been disclosed so far. With shared-ownership memberships, members hold a share of the real estate, so the rules for bearing renewal costs are set by the membership rules and management regulations. For companies and individuals considering a purchase, and for investors assessing the operator’s capital policy, the history of annual (operating and management) fee revisions — which the company discloses in its IR materials — and the membership rules on rebuilding are the main items to check, as they drive exit value.

Summary

Membership resort financing is an advance-payment model that sells customers a building before it is finished. At Resorttrust, deferred revenue for three unopened properties had built up to ¥59.4bn by end-March 2026, and ¥37.4bn was realised in one lump at Nikko when it opened. As the liability structure — ¥6.1bn of borrowings against ¥107.8bn of advances received and ¥149.7bn of long-term deposits received — shows, interest-rate sensitivity is low. On the other hand, construction schedule, construction cost and sales-progress risk are concentrated on the operator. Compared with the open market, a new membership’s per-night cost far exceeds the estimated settled ADR of the seven municipalities where membership properties cluster. Because resale prices are reset by usage value and annual fees, investors need to watch three points: whether sales rates and opening dates progress together, whether annual fee revisions and usage support resale prices, and how the rules on bearing rebuilding costs are disclosed.

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