Wednesday, April 18, 2007

I Love this Game!

Actually I love the playoff format. If your team has home court advantage in the NBA playoffs you could potentially look at 16 playoff games. 16 high profile and high dollar games. Compare that to the NFL where if your team is really good you get two playoff games.

While it is rare to have 16 home playoff games, But we have seen 12 – 13 home games for the teams that reach the finals in recent years. Even if your team does not go far, we still have the opportunity to sell a few games. When the early rounds are averaging $50 - $100 profit per ticket, we are still making money.

The NBA does not make as much during the regular season as MLB or the NFL. But the vast number of playoff games helps bring our returns up. It is also a bit easier to predict who will be going into the playoffs. It take s awhile for an NBA team to improve and once it does, it take a while to decline. It is rare that a team that goes far in the playoffs one year doe not make it back the next. When it does happen, you can often see it coming.

To learn how to make money being a ticket broker, visit www.MyTicketBiz.com

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Summer Concerts and Events

We cannot remember a time when there were so many concert opportunities at one time. What is especially good is that the demographics these concerts are targeting is very diverse. The youth of America has their favorites out while the baby boomers have their choices also. Even alternative rockers have their choice. Here is a sampling what is put there:

Rush Soul2Soul with Tim McGraw and Faith Hill
Bjork Morrissey
Justin Timberlake The Police
Genesis Beyonce
Eric Clapton Dave Matthews
Harry Connick, Jr. John Mayer
Goo Goo Dolls Huey & The News 2007
Steely Dan Jimmy Buffett

On top of that the Disney High School Musical: The Ice Tour has over 100 dates on sale. Most have sold out.

Most music buyers are between 16 and 30. This youthful demographic keeps up with new artist, new sounds.., they want their MTV. The music and concert industry has long targeted them, and has done so successfully.

What we find so fascinating is some of the biggest concert tours are targeting outside this demographic. The number of 70’ and 80’s band that are getting back together and touring is tremendous. We can credit the Rolling Stones for a lot of this. Their last tour was so successful and lasted so long, everyone followed in their footsteps. Good for all.

The other aspect is the Disney effect. Over the last few years they have established numerous events all based on the Disney Channel movies and shows. The Cheetah Girls, High School Musical, Hannah Montana and Hillary Duff have had tremendous rides. Lets not forget all of the (fill in the blank) on Ice tours also.

The Disney effect targets the tweens – kids from 9 – 14. This strategy is working beautifully for them.

What does this mean for us? There are more options on what to do now as opposed to 5 years ago. There are more entertainment options and money is being spent on them all. Every dollar going into this industry is more opportunity for us.

A Good Opportunity

The Yankees are offering what they call a “7 Game Flex Discount Pack. They go on sale Thursday, April 12 at 12:00 noon EST. They are offering seats in good locations. The premium tickets will be at full price, but the other will be as low as $10 under face value. If you are looking into starting something with baseball, this is a good starting point. These packs should go fast.

http://mlb.mlb.com/nyy/ticketing/flex_discount_pack.jsp?c_id=nyy&year=2007&partnerId=2007hp_tixcomponent_nyy_tab4&affiliateID=2007hp_tixcomponent_nyy_tab4

To learn how to make money being a ticket broker, visit www.MyTicketBiz.com

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Baseball Early Ticket Analysis

Everyone is probably tired of talking about baseball by now, but we really wanted to sum up the early ticket sales. These are all of the sales made for regular season games that were sold before the season started. The numbers directly below are our own results.

First Transaction: February 6 (same day we posted them)
Number of Transactions: 191
Number of Tickets Sold: 478
Total Revenue: $37,344
Service Fees / Other Expenses: $4,761
Revenue – Service Fees $31,742
Cost of Goods Sold: $17,880
Profit: $13,862
Percent Inventory Sold: 20.168%
Profit Margin on Tickets Sold: 77.5%

We have sold a fifth of our inventory. That inventory cost us $17,880 and we have $31,742 in the bank from that. Now we do not expect to make a 77.5% return on the remaining 80% of the inventory. There are going to be Tuesday games against the Pirates and Devil Rays that we sill not make money on. We do expect around a 15 – 25% return from the regular season. Hopefully we have some World Series tickets coming in October. If the right teams go, it could be a very profitable year just from baseball.

Here are our top five teams for sales (this is from our sales only):

1) Yankees
2) Cardinals
3) Astros
4) Tigers
5) A’s

Two teams that have underperformed for us are the Giants and Mets. While we have had some good sales, we have only moved about 10% of the inventory from these two teams. Not that bad but a far cry from the 28% on inventory sold by the Yankees.

When we compile the list of top sellers every week, we get this from a variety of sources. We took the data for baseball only from 2/1 – 3/31. Here is how it came out:

Team Average Sold By Major Brokers from 2/1 - 3/31
Boston Red Sox 9753
New York Yankees 8438
Chicago Cubs 4559
St. Louis Cardinals 4410
Detroit Tigers 2419
Baltimore Orioles 2217
San Francisco Giants 2207
New York Mets 1866
Chicago White Sox 1807
Los Angeles Angels 1682
Philadelphia Phillies 1573
Atlanta Braves 1358
Texas Rangers 1294
Cleveland Indians 1264
Colorado Rockies 1135
Los Angeles Dodgers 955
Houston Astros 815
San Diego Padres 814
Cincinnati Reds 788
Kansas City Royals 693
Washington Nationals 615
Pittsburgh Pirates 566
Milwaukee Brewers 558
Minnesota Twins 521
Arizona Diamondbacks 464
Seattle Mariners 393
Oakland Athletics 331
Florida Marlins 248
Toronto Blue Jays 203
Tampa Bay Devil Rays 172


To learn how to make money being a ticket broker, visit www.MyTicketBiz.com

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Opening Day

First a quick story from one of the brokers:

“A few weeks ago you mentioned the Big Game Pack from the Oakland A’s. I bought that the next day. Last week the tickets cam in. I did not price them too high because I wanted to be sure they sold. Well they started selling. The Home Opener and Yankees tickets went real quick. So did one of the Red Sox games. I raised the prices on the rest of the Bigger of the big games since most of them are sorta far off. Between this and a few concerts I have done already, I have made a tidy sum.”

Monday is opening day. Expect a lot of baseball activity for the next 14 days. This is a very busy period for that. Remember to consign your tickets if you have a batch of them. Also keep in mind after the first 10 – 12 days of the baseball season, expect a bit of a slowdown for just over a week. (approx 4/12 – 4/23) This happens every year and should be expected. Activity will resume normal “in-season” activity after that. This is also a good time to remind everyone that we do not make a profit on every MLB game. When the Pirates or Devil Rays come to town for a Tuesday game, you want to price those to move and recover what you can. We make our money on the weekend games and the “big games” to cover those.

Next week we are going to have some analysis on early MLB ticket sales.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Consignments

If you are brokering Major League Baseball tickets, you are probably getting your season tickets this week. Ours have been coming in. This is actually one of busiest times of the year. Not just because MLB sales are picking up, but we have to ship out all of the early sales. Yesterday, for example, we packaged 43 envelopes. It can be time consuming just to tear the tickets apart, make sure you have the right section, the right number of seats, the right shipping label and double checking it all. I will be very happy when I get everything consigned.

I have been asked a couple of times how we deal with the juggling of tickets coming in, fulfilling early sales and consigning. Keep in mind we primarily are selling MLB tickets through Stubhub.
We keep good records of everything that has been sold. I have all of my sale confirmation emails in folders by team. Stubhub’s online system allows you to see all of your transactions waiting shipments on a team by team basis. When we get our tickets for a specific team, we print out all the transactions, generate the shipping labels from Stubhub, double check and start stuffing Fedex envelopes.

We could immediately consign them and let the Stubhub field offices send them out, but doing it ourselves gets the money in our account a week earlier. For us that means several thousand dollars.

As soon as we ship all of the early sales, we immediately Fedex the packages to the appropriate field office. As much as we can, we try to send other tickets in the Fedex packages to save on shipping cost. From this point on all we do is forward out sales confirmation emails to the field offices. Very easy. I will let Stubhub burn through their own printer cartridges.

It is a pain to go through this period, but this is only for about two weeks a year. The rest is click, click, click.

We have had a lot of baseball topics recently. Don’t worry, we have several other topics coming on the horizon. It is a busy time of year for baseball so we need to focus on it for now.

To learn how to make money being a ticket broker, visit www.MyTicketBiz.com

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

A Good Day

While not every day is like this, we enjoy when it happens.

One theme you repeatedly hear from us in the book and this subscription is that you must list your tickets early. There are several reasons for this:

• Less competition - Most tickets are not listed till the last few weeks before the event.
• Higher prices - People are willing to pay more for the guarantee they get the seats they want.
• Hype – with every event, whether it is a concert or sporting event, there is a lot of early hype. People responding to the hype are likely to pay higher prices.
• Cash Flow – Money in your pocket today is better than money in your pocket tomorrow.

Back to our good day. Just with MLB, we sold 54 tickets that day. This was across 14 transactions. Our cost of goods sold was $1874 and our revenue (minus service fees) was $3287. This was a profit of $1413. That is a return of 75% return on those goods.

While this is a good volume of ticket for a whole day, this day actually brought our return for MLB for pre-season sales. Our early sales are running about a 90% profit margin so far.

Now we are not going to keep these types of returns all season long. Included in our sales are many opening day tickets, Saturday games, interleague games and other big events. These always get higher prices. There are going to be some Tuesday games against the Devil Rays or the Pirates that are going to go unsold. There are going to be many games that we take a loss or break even. The more we sell early and the better returns we get, we offset those less profitable events. When it is all said and done we expect to realize a profit margin of 25% – 30%.

Not everything is a home run. We need to put ourselves into a position of realizing the maximum returns where we can and minimize the losses in other places. In the end the higher returns win.

To learn how to make money being a ticket broker, visit www.MyTicketBiz.com

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

I Love 80s Rock

We have been getting a lot of stories from people about some of the deals they have been making with The Police tickets. This has been by far the hottest ticket going on. They have been adding shows left and right to fill the demand. On our top 250 we show the activity from the last month. When I broke it out by the last week, the police have surpassed Wicked. That is really saying something.

As if the Police were not enough, Genesis has announced tour dates. Here is what has been announced so far

09/07 Toronto BMO Field Canada
09/11 Boston TD Banknorth Garden Arena
09/14 Montreal Stade Olympique Canada
09/16 Hartford Civic Center
09/18 Philadelphia Wachovia Center
09/22 Columbus Nationwide Arena
09/23 Washington Verizon Center
09/27 East Rutherford Giants Stadium
09/29 Cleveland Quicken Loans Arena
09/30 Detroit Palace of Auburn Hills
10/02 Chicago United Center
10/09 San Jose HP Pavilion
10/12 Los Angeles Hollywood Bowl

Not all of these dates have ticket sale dates announced yet. See below for the ones that do. We expect Genesis to be as popular a tour as the Police.

Good Deal

The Oakland A’s have announced a very unique ticket package, that we absolutely love. It is called the Big Game Pack. You get tickets to all the big selling games.

Opponent Games
White Sox (Home Opener) 1
Yankees 3
Red Sox 4
Giants (Interleague) 3
Cardinals (Interleague & WS Champs) 3
Tigers 3
Angels (last home series) 3
Fireworks Night 3

Many of you will recall that these are the games that give us the best returns of the year. Buying tickets directly from the team bypasses all of those nasty service fees that we incur when we go through ticket master.

If you are thinking about doing some baseball, and we recommend it, this is a great opportunity to do so.

To learn how to make money being a ticket broker, visit www.MyTicketBiz.com