Best in house
Startup company matches unwanted season-ticket seats with Senators fans keen for a premium spot at the rink.
Even in a shortened National Hockey League season, many season-ticket holders can’t attend every Ottawa Senators game. Their choices have been to give their tickets away, try to resell them — perhaps for well below face value — or let the seats go empty. Now they have another option. Broker4Tickets, an Ottawa company, is providing a no-fuss consignment service that finds buyers for unwanted seats.
Since its launch on Jan. 25, 2013, just six days after the NHL lockout ended, demand has grown by the game, says Broker4Tickets founder Neil Cooke.
That’s a relief for the businessman, a founding partner of telecommunications consulting firm I4C, which has offices across Canada. While the lockout continued, he says, no one wanted to talk about selling tickets.
“We couldn’t go to season-ticket holders, because they’re going to say, ‘There’s not even going to be a season — why would I want to talk to you about ticket utilization?’ ” says Cooke.
Now, with the lockout memories quickly fading, Broker4Tickets is competing with StubHub, the eBay subsidiary that formed a partnership with the Senators this year to resell tickets. The team said it wanted to give fans the widest possible audience for getting rid of tickets they can’t use, while combating the counterfeiting that is becoming an increasing problem with resale tickets.
Cooke says his service is different because it sells only seats held by the team’s approximately 10,500 season-ticket holders. That, he says, allows him to guarantee the tickets are valid.
“If I can’t quantify that (someone selling tickets) is a true season-ticket holder, my answer is no, because I don’t know where they got them from,” he says.
Unlike StubHub, which charges a commission to both buyer and seller, Broker4Tickets’ 20-per-cent commission is charged only to the seller. The service still gives sellers a quick return on their investment, Cooke says, while buyers get “no service fees, premium seats and guaranteed tickets.”
Under Ontario law, tickets cannot be sold for more than face value.
“(We) give the fans access to seats they’ve never had access to because they were always owned by seasonticket holders,” says Cooke. “We have tickets against the glass, in lower level 100s, and low 300s.”
To sell through Broker4Tickets, season holders must assign the seats to the service by contacting the team’s ticket department. That automatically invalidates the hard tickets they hold and allows the service to sell them by email as PDF attachments. Though that format is a favourite for counterfeiters, Cooke says his system eliminates any chance of fraud.
“We know we have the only live ticket for that seat. It’s piece of mind for us.”
If the tickets sell through the Broker4Tickets website, the season holder is sent a cheque. Broker4Tickets offers about 150 premium tickets per game and generally sells about 90 per cent of its inventory, Cooke says.
There are no “fire sale” discounts as game time approaches.
“What that does is drives buyer behaviour to wait until the last minute,” says Cooke. “We’re not interested in competing with the guys on Kijiji and people who are trying to make five bucks on a ticket. That’s not our business.”
Cooke, himself a Senators seasonticket subscriber, says his service is attractive for fans who have to be away for extended periods but don’t want to give up their season rights.
You can assign an entire season to us,” said Cooke. “You retain your rights and have the potential of earning your money back.”
Cooke anticipates gross sales of $300,000 in the company’s first fiscal year, which ends June 30, and up to $500,000 in the next year.
With Broker4Tickets’ success, Cooke hopes to expand into other Canadian hockey markets. Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton are target cities because of their high proportion of season holders. He says he’d like to slowly get into other sports markets as well, so long as he can build a strong network of season-ticket holders and offer at least 50 tickets a game.