So for all intents and purposes we broke even, but definitely learned a few good lessons. But before I get into what I’d do differently, here’s the data:

And broken down by section:

OK, so why did we barely profit and what would I do differently?

• The 15% commission is the commission from StubHub. We didn’t even attempt to try to sell them elsewhere. If I did this again I might try Craigslist, Twitter, Facebook, or even starting my own site to try to avoid the commission and/or make more per ticket.
• StubHub is easy to use, but also very competitive, which led to us being conservative in our pricing. We didn’t want any unsold tickets. Perhaps we could have made more if we were a little more risky.
• We originally listed the season tickets as a package. There was no activity but we didn’t pull them and split them into individual games until almost the start of the regular season. I think this was part of the reason that we were conservative in our pricing.
• We were slackers and didn’t even attempt to sell the pre-season tickets. We probably could have gotten $10 or $20 a pop. Instead I just aggregated the price of those into each regular season pair of tickets.
• We sold two pairs of tickets to a friend at face value (502 for both the Giants & Raiders game). Since we didn’t sell the pre-season games these were actually at a loss. Also – that Giants game on Thanksgiving (as much as it sucked) was a very popular ticket so we probably cost ourselves some profit there.
• We waited until we received the tickets to put them up on StubHub. We should have done it as soon as they charged my credit card. If we were to do it next year, we could list them as soon as StubHub allows for it. This time we missed out on all of the July and August buyers.
• The cheaper tickets were more profitable. Some of that is because of the ones we sold to our friend, but mostly I think it’s because the seats weren’t all that much worse and the face value was $40 less per pair. Both seats were in the upper-deck and on the ends. Had one been lower-deck in the middle, it would have been a different story. Just a hypothesis here, but I think the most profitable tickets are at the extremes: cheap seats like we had in 524 and super expensive seats in the lower level.
• While NFL attendance is still pretty good, I think people are a little more cautious in their discretionary spending. The demand isn’t quite as high as we had hoped, which made StubHub all the more competitive. Even if a stadium sells out, there’s a big difference in ticket prices if the demand is 50% over capacity vs 1% over capacity.
• I deeply regret signing up for all of the other season ticket waiting lists. They bombard my email, snail mail, and phone with all sorts of ticket offers (except season tickets of course…which I don’t want now anyway).

With all of that said, I don’t think we’ll do it again. I enjoyed it. I’m glad I did it. But it was a decent amount of work. I don’t plan on being in Denver any time soon, nor am I a big Broncos fan.

I should probably just stick to making money with my day job.

I have one person interested in them (friend of a friend) so I’ll give him first dibs.  If not, we’ll probably throw them up on StubHub.  The good news is that the Broncos season ticket waiting list is up to 28,000 and the wait is 13 – 15 years.  The bad news is that the economy (or perceived economy) stinks so it might be a little tougher to sell than I originally anticipated.  Not to mention, Mike and I both agreed that we’d rather sell the entire season as a package as opposed to splitting them up into individual game sales (1 or 2 transactions vs potentially 20 transactions).  Maybe next year when we have some more time on our hands to experiment with that. That 50% ROI might not be as realistic as 20% or 30%.

Nonetheless, I’ll still post the progress and hopefully show that with relatively little effort and minimal risk one can make a solid return on NFL season tickets.  Here are some pics of the ticket booklets:

I hadn’t thought much about this since then.  Until of course last week when I was at my parents house and I saw that there was a letter there for me from the Denver Broncos.  Apparently I am now eligible to buy season tickets.  4 of them in fact.  But I had to decide by June 16th, a little over a week after I got the letter.  Which makes sense because I’m sure a lot of people decline to buy or have forgotten about it or moved, so they need time to send more letters to other people on the list prior to tickets being sent out in July.

The letter also said something really interesting – that the wait had now grown to 15 – 20 years and that if I didn’t buy tickets by June 16th I’d be placed at the back of the line again.

After debating it for a little while, I ran it by my partners who emphatically pushed me to buy the tickets.  I ended up deciding to buy a pair and Mike decided he’d snatch up the other pair.  So here’s the deal – all season long I’m going to track exactly what we do with these tickets.  I’ll post when we sell each pair, how much we sell them for, and how much work is involved.

We had choices between two different sections, one for $580/seat and the other for $420/seat.  We decided to experiment and get a pair from each.  We ended up with 2 seats in section 524 and 2 in section 502 (map here).  The grand total – including an $8 service charge per ticket – came to $2,032.  The very nice lady on the phone informed me that I’ll be receiving the tickets in the mail in July.  At that time we’ll decide exactly how we’ll be selling the tickets.

However, if you do the math it looks like we’re already in pretty good shape if we threw them on StubHub.  We’re paying $52.50/ticket and $72.50/ticket if you don’t factor in the two pre-season games that we might not be able to unload.  Some games are already over $100 for the low…in June.  Season ticket packages start at $675, which means we could sell off the entire season right now and still make out pretty good.

It also helps that the Broncos have the schedule from God.  They have quite possibly the four best road teams coming in – Dallas, New England, Pittsburgh, and the Giants.  Then they have their three division rivals coming in – San Diego, Oakland, and Kansas City.  The only not-so-popular team is Cleveland, and that is their home opener, which always has high demand.  The two pre-season games that we get are essentially meaningless (Chicago and Arizona) – we’ll be lucky to get $20/ticket for those games.

The only thing working against us is that the Broncos might totally suck, considering that Josh McDaniels is insane and all.  Hopefully they’ll at least be respectable…or at least respectable until we unload all of our tickets.

All in all, if this can’t work with this team in this season, it probably won’t be worth my time to try it again with another team in another season.  Our goal is to get a 50% return on our investment by the time the season ends in December.  That’s approximately six months to turn $2k into $3k. Should be fun.