As others have posted, booking at DVC resorts cannot even begin until 11 months before the start of a vacation. This applies to owners and DVC (which retains 1%-2% of all points at each resort). And there are only a couple of ways that Disney can acquire a DVC room for a cash reservation.
The first would be to use their percentage of points to reserve a room and sell it for cash. Technically, they are only supposed to reserve a room with those points in order to have inventory available if a maintenance issue occurs with a room. But as many DVC owners have learned when they got a room with problems, the resorts are often sold out and no room is available to move them to.
The next way for a room to come available is when a DVC member trades their points out to
ABD,
DCL or for a regular hotel room. DVC takes those points and reserves villas, and then gives them to Disney to sell for cash DVC uses the cash to pay for the trade. Those villas can become available at any point after the 11-month window opens. With ABD and DCL both sidelined, members aren't trading out their points, so fewer rooms are coming available that way.
The last way is thru what is known as breakage. Any villas that remain unreserved by members at 60 days out can be turned over to Disney for cash inventory. The cash goes to DVC and it can be used to offset members' annual dues. Typically, the unreserved villas tend to be at SSR, OKW and AKV (the largest WDW DVC resorts), but other resorts do become available for cash reservations, especially in slower DVC periods like the summer months.
It just popped up on one of my daily searches. Good luck! And yes, it's a cash reservation.
