Looking to further strengthen its hold on the greater Boston secondary ticket market, Ace Ticket has bought Roth Ticket Agency, which has been serving the Providence market since 1947.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but TicketNews estimates the acquisition price at about $2 million. Ace Ticket, which is the official secondary ticket company of the Boston Red Sox, generated an estimated $30 million in revenues in 2008.

The deal marks Ace Ticket’s seventh acquisition of a regional secondary ticket company over the past several years, further boosting its name in Massachusetts/Rhode Island area. Ace Ticket currently has eight storefront locations in the greater Boston area, where its advertising is ubiquitous, but it is closing the Roth Ticket Agency office in the Westin Hotel in Providence, according to Ace Ticket owner Jim Holzman.

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Alan Zura, owner of Roth Ticket Agency, will become a consultant at Ace Ticket, but whether there will be a future Ace Ticket location in Providence is under consideration. “What our research has told us is that consumers in Rhode Island aren’t buying tickets to Rhode Island events,” Holzman told TicketNews. “So, whether we’ll open a Providence office remains to be seen, but we’ll take a good, hard look at it.”

Attempts to reach Zura were unsuccessful.

Over the past 30 years, Holzman has methodically built a solid foundation as Boston’s leading secondary ticketing company, growing organically and through acquisition, and boasting relationships with not only the Red Sox but also the Boston Bruins and area media companies.

Roth Ticket Agency, which has been in business for more than 60 years, has a strong reputation in Providence, and Holzman believes those customers will benefit from the additional ticket inventory that Ace Ticket provides. In addition, Ace Ticket can check another competitor off the list of regional ticket resellers that was vying for area customers.

“I look at our major competitors as being the large aggregators, like StubHub and TicketNetwork,” Holzman said. TicketNetwork is the parent company of TicketNews.

Holzman would not disclose what companies he was looking at for other potential acquisitions, or which companies may have contacted him about buying Ace Ticket, but he said he is always willing to listen to potential deals. Last month, the Wall Street Journal exposed one possible deal where two years ago Ticketmaster sought to acquire Ace Ticket and several other secondary ticket companies. Holzman declined to discuss the matter, but did not refute the veracity of the stories.

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“We’re constantly looking at possible acquisitions, but it’s very challenging for a small- to medium-sized independent ticket broker,” Holzman said. “At the end of the day, I want to do what’s best for the customer, the company and our employees.”

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