By the way, the work your doing on this Pete is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to anyone who is considering buying DVC. Why? Because if I know what the pattern will be for booking, why would I waste more 'expensive' DVC home resort points vs 7 month generic ones? Also vice versa, the true value of any home resort can only be known when you know just HOW IN DEMAND it will be, otherwise, why buy in there?
They system
@skier_pete developed is best looked at by the well devised color coding patterns. The terms "mostly" and "spotty" should really be a secondary measure of availability. If you look at the calendar and see that at 7-months, when you travel, that it's green/"open", great! Buy SSR cheap. Barring a fundamental shift in how DVC booking patterns work (e.g., reallocation of points between studios and 1BRs, rebalancing of points throughout the year), you should be good,
for now. That's the big caveat. In the two years since these charts were made, Pete has noted that studios are getting increasingly difficult to book overall. There is no certainty in how that pattern will look in 5 years, 10 years.
Looking at the chart today, even with rooms "mostly" available at 7 months, it could still mean that the first day is unavailable right at 7 months - or becomes unavailable immediately at the 8am mark, making it a challenge for a non-home-resort owner to book any stretch of stay during that period despite it being mostly available.
Suppose for example, you are looking to travel October 15th-22nd at AKV. AKV may be "mostly" available in a given two-week period (at least 8 out of 15 days open), but if the first few days of when you're looking to book are not open when you want them, you can't book the other days, despite there being 12 other days scattered throughout that period. Looking back at the chart colors, yellow should be a warning that you may need to be flexible.
Others have had great success with going the 1BR route with SSR points. But a big component of that working is a degree of flexibility around travel dates, contentment with staying at SSR, and little expectation being able to travel during the the September-mid-January period.
@Wakey comes to mind as someone who has done this with great success.
SSR happens to be the most cost effective option for now, but I would posit that even the most skeptical of the "buy where you'd be happy staying" are in fact buying where they are happy staying when they buy SSR. I wonder how many people, if all things were equal in terms of the economics ($/point/years), would be comfortable buying VB and rolling the dice on being able to swap out at a WDW resort at 7 months.
All this is to suggest that the charts are a tremendous guide, but the idea of buying where you are happy staying is still sound advice. Even if the "where" is as broad as WDW.
And I also said this in my original post - I did these tables for myself. My only "nice" act really is sharing it with everyone.
Not buying it. That's like saying, I go to Disney because I love to. I just bring the family along because it's nice. As a beneficiary of these charts when I bought in, it's pretty friggin' nice you did this.