For some fans, it can be a life long dream to have season tickets to see their favorite team year in and year out. But with teams starting to use personal seat licenses (PSLs) for their season ticket holders, that fan needs to know somebody or know a guy who knows a guy just for the chance to get their hands on that license.
That’s what happened to Kyle Burks. Living in Houston, he wanted to purchase a PSL for his team the Houston Texans and found them difficult to come by. Taking out an ad in his local paper to find someone who was selling theirs, Burks found someone but ultimately found that the process was “nerve racking” and left him hoping that the man actually was the owner of a PSL.
His experience led to Burks creating SeasonTicketRights.com, an online marketplace for fans to buy and sell their PSLs. The site, the result of months of development, is aimed to create a safe and easy process for transactions that have ranged to as high as $200,000, so far.
“The closest thing [to PSLs] is real estate,” Burks told TicketNews, adding that purchasing the license is an equity that can be bought and sold at a profit. At times a person can buy a PSL for as low as $1,000 and could potentially resell it less than a year later at a substantial profit.
Launched in October 2006, the demands for a site like SeasonTicketRights.com were evident. By the end of 2006, the site had already completed $130,000 in seat license sales. A year later saw a 5,000 percent growth in sales to $6.6 million and 2008 is projected to bring in $20 million in sales.
Among the accomplishments for SeasonTicketRights.com is the entering of exclusive partnership agreements with many professional sports teams and venues including the St. Louis Cardinals, San Diego Padres, Baltimore Ravens and most recently the Kansas Speedway. The agreement allows the team or venue to advertise the marketplace to fans with SeasonTicketRights.com operating the marketplace and paying the team or venue a percentage of the fees.
Burks said that his website has taken time to make the patent-pending transaction process as easy and safe as possible, and will be continually evolving as the popularity of PSLs continue to grow.
PSLs have made big news in previous months with the Dallas Cowboys introducing record high prices for the PSLs for their new stadium and the New York Giants and Jets toying with the idea of using licenses for their new stadium as well. In the future Burks hopes to help fans of these teams and believes the future may see personal seat licenses span across all of sports, theatre and entertainment.
Burks adds that the benefits for teams could be huge in profitability and brand marketing. In essence selling a PSL to an individual would make that person the team or venue’s “sale staff”, as Burks called them. Saying that if the person did not want to purchase season tickets for themselves, they could then look to find someone who did which in turn would keep sales up.
As the marketplace continues to grow and personal seat licenses become the standard, Kyle Burks and SeasonTicketRights.com stands at the forefront of that market.
“I’m just happy to be part of it,” Burks said.
