10k couldnt get me in
MrAdvantage
Senior Member
i went to Phoenix for the week. I am a huge Pats fan. My budget was 6k for a get in or 10k for a decent seat. Based on years past, I passed on tickets right after the con games anticipating the usual price drop. It got wore and worse. Briefly sat night tix game down from 12k ( get ins/ nosebleeds) to 6400. Finally the market is loosening and it was gonna work out. Nope, 9k when i woke up and 10,500 when i got down to the stadium, again for end zone uppers lol. I gave my driver an extra 200$ to look out for anything as the game started. $150 got me in a stadium side gyro joint, standing room only (400$ to sit) With 12 minutes left in the SECOND Q, my man texts me that he can get 2 lowers on the 30 for 8500$ each. as i walk outside to call him with a counter offer he texts me back some one scooped them already lol. Have tickets to anything at a large venue ever been this crazy
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What happened here was a squeeze on the short sellers that never had the tix in hand and the few select brokers which held most of the inventory knew who they where, so they pulled their inventory off the exchanges to deliberately fuck them over. Once the short sellers sold everything the few guys with the tix in hand where then able to charge what ever they want and that's when the squeeze begun. I know 2 shorts that lost over 200k each on stub hub after they had to fill the orders. The shorts figured that according to previous statistical data that the outcome would be in their favor which it should of been, except this time the brokers with the real inventory colluded to fuck them over.
Allegations of collusion and marketplace manipulation are being thrown around as average asking prices for Super Bowl tickets topped a staggering $9,000 this week.
This wasn’t how we were told things would play out.
Generally speaking, every year, there’s a predictable arc to Super Bowl ticket prices on the secondary market. The market rate for Super Bowl tickets tends to be high (perhaps three times face value) in the days before the AFC and NFC Championship games, and then once it’s clear who will play in the Super Bowl, there’s usually a price spike as fans clamber for the chance to see their team win the title. After this initial wave of purchases subsides, prices tend to drop as Super Bowl Sunday nears and sellers don’t want to get stuck with seats at the last minute.
Understandably, the trajectory and peak for pricing is a little different every year, depending on which teams are squaring off and where the game is being played. Projections for the 2015 Super Bowl’s ticket prices called for seats to be less expensive than usual, supposedly because of “fatigue” among fans of the two teams in the game, the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks, who have both played and won it all over the past decade.
Yet the price drop almost everyone expected over the past couple of weeks never took place. Soon after the AFC and NFC Championship games ending, asking prices were relatively cheap, with the average ticket selling for around $2,900 and the cheapest tickets available for roughly $1,900. At the start of this week, the average list price was up to $6,500 and the “cheap” seats were at least $4,200.
By Thursday afternoon, $7,100 was the least expensive ticket posted for sale on secondary market sites such as TiqIQ, while StubHub alerted the media that the “current average list price for the Super Bowl is $9,484.37, which is up 282.43% since last year at this time ($2,480.06).”
That’s at the sites that actually had access to tickets. As of midday on Friday, popular secondary ticket exchanges like Vivid Seats and Razor Gator had posted messages to the effect of “Sorry, but we currently have no tickets available for this event.” StubHub listed fewer than 300 seats available for purchase, with asking prices ranging from roughly $7,500 to $40,000. The NFL’s official Ticket Exchange by Ticketmaster site listed 109 tickets for sale, with individual seats starting at $6,500. Anyone interested in a pair of seats together would have to pay at least $7,800 per ticket. Face value for Super Bowl tickets ranges from $800 to $1,900.
What caused the ticket supply to shrink and prices to go totally bonkers? In its Thursday release about skyrocketing prices, StubHub accused a handful of unnamed large ticket sellers in control of most of the Super Bowl ticket inventory of colluding with each other and manipulating the marketplace. “A consolidation of supply has allowed sellers to manipulate the marketplace and made it near impossible for any last minute fans to attend the game,” StubHub global head of communications Glenn Lehrman said in the release.
At the start of this week, the explanation for the unexpected rise in prices was that many brokers had been “short-selling” tickets, based on the assumption that the previously established pattern would hold true and prices would fall as Super Bowl Sunday neared. To short-sell tickets, “a broker typically lists tickets in a generic section of the stadium and doesn’t disclose exactly where the seats are until the Wednesday before the game,” as a post by ESPN’s Darren Rovell explained. “The idea for the brokers is to take money from ticket buyers when the tickets are at a higher price after the conference title games, then actually buy the tickets days later as the prices start to come down.”
Apparently, tons of brokers hopped on board this scheme of selling tickets on “spec”—only when the time came to buy actual seats later on as promised, the going prices in the marketplace were far higher than brokers had anticipated. In the investing world, they call that a “short squeeze.”
StubHub says that the collusion of a few large ticket sellers has limited supply to “essentially short-squeeze brokers and make the marketplaces” such as StubHub and VividSeats “buy up the supply at upwards of 4x market value.”
One clear end result is that unless you’re rich or the Mayor of Glendale, Ariz., the host town for this year’s Super Bowl, you’re basically out of luck in terms of getting tickets to the game. Everyday fans are the big losers in all of this. On the other hand, the ticket sellers being accused of rigging the game—the ones who allegedly held back supply and pushed prices skyward—have been cashing in over the past few days.
As for secondary market sites like StubHub and TiqIQ, as well as the smaller brokers whose sales take place on these sites, the results are somewhat muddled. “At the end of the day, many brokers took a big hit from this, while very few made a profit,” TiqIQ’s Chris Matcovitch said in an email. In some cases, the secondary market sites have felt forced to pay far above market rates in order to save face and not have brokers breaking the promise of tickets sold on spec. According to TiqIQ, overall ticket prices on its site have been average as far as Super Bowls go, though the volume of sales is down “significantly.”
“You will be hearing horror stories all weekend,” said Matcovich. “People without tickets, brokers folding, lawsuits, etc.”
So we’re got another NFL scandal on our hands. How surprising.
Mostly from players on teams who don't make the playoffs. They wait for them in the parking lots after their last team meeting at seasons end. Every player gets 4 tix and 75% of them sell them in the parking lot to brokers. Some of the brokers also get them from their Rep where ever they may be season ticket holders at as long as that team is going to the super bowl.
No I can't. This one tops them all off.
That is not part of the reason, because those tickets went up on the TM exchange at 3x face or higher, not to brokers. The NFL would never risk making back door deals with brokers when they have TM scalping for them legally the past couple of years.
For regular events such as concerts with on sales it's due to spinners. Allows for pulling multiple windows up through ticketmaster at the same time and instantly upon the onsale going live. The regular public has no chance vs a program like this. They are highly illegal but I don't know any broker doing volume that doesn't use one.
Highly Illegal??? common man, TM has only caught 3 brokers in 10 years using them... RMG... Wiseguys.. and the Irish Hig brothers from Boston, which all got a slap on the wrist and laughed their way out of the court room. Bots are close to dead. Best way for the public to buy tix is using the Ipad TM app.
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/34/other-other-topics/ask-professional-ticket-broker-thead-851672/
I guess he never used Google trends and don't know demographics. That article is way to old, the industry has changed. At least he was on the Stubhub large seller discount plan.
I haven't. One of my partners said he read something on the pro talk message board about it but I never looked into it
Aren't there e-tickets you could buy for basically events all over the states and just re-sell them on stubhub or cragslist etc. ?
I noticed that the poster was traveling to some of the places to sell tickets, anyone know why?
Were e-tickets not as prevalent 5 years ago?
that's because he didn't know how to beat Will Call and paperless tix. You need to know people to convert those to e-tix.
http://fortune.com/2015/01/31/super-bowl-ticket-price-chart/