Basketball team’s recent success affects sidewalk ticket sales

Tickets to the IU vs. Michigan State basketball game fanned from Randy Hammond’s hand Tuesday as he wandered Assembly Hall’s parking lot.

Hammond, a ticket broker who works for ETA Tickets, stayed close to the stadium’s south entrance, haggling with prospective ticket buyers.

Half an hour before tipoff, he still had more tickets than he thought he’d have.

“I buy season tickets off people, then sell game by game,” he said. “It’s a lot of work. People don’t realize. You can’t pick and choose games.”

The scene outside Assembly Hall changes drastically for bigger games, which more people want to attend. On Feb. 22, when IU played North Carolina Central, four ticket brokers and scalpers waited near the entrance of the stadium. Less than a week later, at the Michigan State game, the number of ticket sellers more than doubled.

Hammond didn’t always have to deal with more competition. In Tom Crean’s early years as head coach, tickets weren’t moving as much.

This year, however, it’s been harder to get tickets to buy and sell. This year, Crean’s team is winning. This year, everyone wants to go to the games. And more scalpers want in on the profits.

At about 6:45 p.m. Tuesday, 15 minutes before tipoff, Hammond haggled with three customers.

“$350,” Hammond said, holding out three tickets.

“I don’t know, it’s getting close to tipoff,” Shane Martin said. He lit a cigarette and put it in his mouth.

“$300.”

Martin shook his head. “How about $260? $275?”

Hammond paused, nodded. He had to get rid of the tickets.

Martin took out his wallet, the cigarette hanging from his lips. He counted his bills, then handed the money to Hammond.

“You just have to wait ‘til they’re at the price you want,” Martin said, heading into Assembly Hall. “They’re well over face value.”

Hammond said he has sold IU basketball tickets since before Crean came on.  He said Crean’s first years compared to this season — he held up his left hand, making a circle with his fingers and thumb, then did the same with his right — are like “day and night.”

“The only thing good about the first year was some people didn’t realize how much the prices were dropping,” Hammond said.

But ticket brokers, people who sell tickets mostly via the phone and online instead of at the stadium, still took a substantial loss in those first years, which Patrick O’Steen, owner of Bloomington-based company Tickets for Less, Inc., said some don’t realize.

“We were stuck with several games where we couldn’t sell any tickets,” he said. “So we end up with 30, 40 tickets and lose $2,000 a game.”

By buying season tickets, Hammond said, he will get money back out of this season’s biggest five games.

“Then the rest is profit,” he said. “The biggest five games of the year will make the starting money back.”

O’Steen said his company tries to sell all its tickets via the phone and be out of them by game day, but when he has tickets left, he’ll have someone sell them at the stadium.

For the Michigan State game, O’Steen said he had six tickets left to sell, some of them dead center, row 12.

“We were trying to get $295 each for them,” he said. “I think we ended up getting $150 each for them.”

The closer the game, the more perishable the tickets become, and prices usually go down, O’Steen said. But in instances when there are no tickets on the market, O’Steen said prices can shoot up.

“Generally, for most events, especially if it’s a week day, if you don’t care if you go or not, you can save some money,” he said.

People buying the tickets think brokers are making a huge profit, but most of the time that’s not the case, O’Steen said. He said he doesn’t get tickets for $35 then sell them for a $300 profit. He usually spends a few hundred dollars per ticket to make a $50 profit, then sells 50 tickets.

“They say, ‘How can you charge $250 a ticket?’” he said. “They don’t think about the four years that it took us to make a profit. Like, right now for Purdue, good Purdue tickets, you’re paying a couple hundred a ticket.”

O’Steen said as of Wednesday, there were only 20 or 30 tickets for the Purdue game Sunday left on the market.

“It can be expensive for the average fan to go on a year like this,” O’Steen said. “But nobody’s going on bad years, and we’re taking kind of a beating.”

Five minutes after tipoff Tuesday, the momentum changed.

Crowds of people no longer rushed by the scalpers, who still had a few tickets to sell.
Though IU’s rankings this season have increased the ticket selling business, the demand hasn’t made Hammond or the other ticket brokers’ job any easier.

At 7:10, Hammond wandered off for home, a few tickets still in hand.