Season ticket resale can be “a lot of work” without research and the right platform, says TiqAssist chief executive and founder Chris Babu.
In an interview with Sportico, Babu said that it is not the case that tickets can be “thrown” up for NBA, NFL, NHL and MLS games in the US on resale sites such as StubHub or Ticketmaster and be instantly sold.
In order to operate this way, season ticket holders that can no longer attend a game will have to research the price of tickets, as pricing engines for the majority of these resale sites are based on historical sales prices. Users will then have to re-price tickets a number of times to match downward trends as the games approach.
“If you’re listing on just one marketplace, you’re only reaching 20-25% of [potential] buyers,” Babu told Sportico. “If you don’t price aggressively enough to begin with, you’re just going to chase that price curve down towards the bottom. It’s a lot of work [to get tickets sold].”
Babu explained that clients can sign up to TiqAssist, which allows them to list a ticket, choose which game and the platform does the rest for them. The app lists the seats across a number of resale platforms including Ticketmaster, Vivid Seats, StubHub and SeatGeek.
The app automatically re-prices the tickets every 10 minutes and TiqAssist’s reseller tools take down the listing as soon as the sale goes through to avoid double-selling. TiqAssist also has a minimum resale value and even guarantees the sale.
Babu said that if a ticket doesn’t sell, the company will make a cash offer at fair market value for the seats but added that this does not happen very often.
TiqAssist operates on a commission basis and charges around 25-30%, which also includes marketplace fees.
Babu and co-founder Jamie Zimmerman started the company in 2017 with just three season-ticket holders listing seats for a Golden State Warriors (pictured) game in the NBA. Babu has previous experience in the industry with senior management roles with e-commerce giant eBay and resale platform StubHub.
TiqAssist now has roughly 250 clients across the US, and is not quite consistently profitable due to various reasons such as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, according to the article, Babu believed that the company had entered its growth period.
Image: Christian/CC BY-SA 2.0/Edited for size