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Super Bowl's glamour invites scams

02/03/2005

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - When Super Bowl XL arrives in Detroit a year from this week, it'll bring more than fans in funny hats. It'll also bring sky-high prices as everyone looks to cash in on the big game.

Signs of a Super-sized inflation are certainly evident everywhere this week in Jacksonville as the city greets an estimated 100,000 visitors for Sunday's Super Bowl XXXIX at Alltel Stadium.

Hotel rates are running two to three times higher than normal. Residents are offering to rent their houses for thousands of dollars. Even out-of-town bicycle taxis have shown up on Jacksonville streets, charging three times their normal fares.

National Football League executives lament the gold-rush mentality, saying it tarnishes the league's premier event. Jim Steeg, the NFL's executive in charge of the Super Bowl for the past 25 years, said there's a limit to what consumers will put up with, even to party at pro football's wildly popular championship.

"I think one of the things that everybody thinks in these things is that the consumer either doesn't have choices or they're not that smart," he said. "And so people will shop around or decide not to go. You can see it in Jacksonville, where people started pricing private homes at $30,000 for the week, which nobody's going to buy. Either they go without getting any business or they end up lowering their rates."

Hotel rates are the most obvious markup. At a Wingate Inn in Jacksonville's Southpoint district, for example, rooms normally rent for $89 per night. The rate for a four-night stay over Super Bowl weekend runs $220 a night.

Or consider boat slips. At the River City Marina in downtown Jacksonville, a boat slip that normally rents for about $500 a month is going for at least $3,500 during Super Bowl week. Slips for larger boats go for three or four times that amount. Marina manager Lee Logan makes no apologies for the markup. He notes that brokers are selling tickets for Sunday's game at a generous multiple of the $500 and $600 face values.

"When you figure tickets are $2,000 apiece for a crap ticket, it's nothing," he said of his prices. "They'd rather be on their yacht than in the hotels because they get their privacy on their boat. And there's no prettier view in Jacksonville than right here in the heart of downtown."

Detroiters saw an early version of all this during last summer's Ryder Cup golf matches. Homeowners in northern Oakland County were offering to lease out their dwellings for a week at windfall prices. Most were disappointed as visitors found cheaper lodging.

That's happening in Jacksonville, too. About 1,400 residents offered their houses, condos and apartments for short-term leases this week in a program organized by the Jacksonville Super Bowl Host Committee. They were asking anywhere from about $500 a night for a one-bedroom apartment to $200,000 for the week for a top-of-the-line, 11-bedroom oceanfront house.

As of Tuesday, only about 200 properties had leased out, and owners were slashing their asking prices, said Walter Williams, president of Coldwell Banker Walter Williams Realty, the Jacksonville brokerage handling the program for the Host Committee. The oceanfront house hasn't rented, and Williams said he doesn't expect it to, at least not without a drastic markdown.

Patrick Duncan, the Host Committee's director for lodging and accommodations, said the recent decline in asking prices was expected as game day neared.

"I think a lot of people had images of making way too much money," he said. "I think it's just a matter of everybody getting realistic."

The frenzy for a high-stakes payoff was fueled by Internet postings during last year's Super Bowl in Houston of rental properties with sky-high asking prices. But Duncan says most of the owners there never made any money.

"You always hear about that one house that rented for $125,000 for the week," he said. "You never hear about the ones that rented for $3,000."

The money fever extends beyond housing costs. Service providers of all kinds are coming to Jacksonville in hopes of cashing in .

Terry Fisher, a native of Allen Park who now lives in West Palm Beach, Fla., came to Jacksonville this week with his employer, City Cyclers, to operate a bicycle-taxi service. Fees are always negotiable for each rider, but Fisher is hoping to boost his normal rate of $5 for a 15-minute ride to $10 or $15 for the same period.

His effort is complicated by the high prices that Fisher and his co-workers have to pay, including an NFL license to operate near Alltel Stadium and the high lodging rates they're facing. Fisher said his $60-a-night motel room jumps to $280 per night later this week, so he and his coworkers found a boarding house that will sleep several to a room for $125.

"Everybody wants to capitalize on this," he said. "I don't blame them. I want to make some money on this myself."

Of course, if prices are higher this week, so, too, are the operating expenses that hotels, restaurants and bars are facing. Some restaurants that normally close by midnight are staying open until 2 a.m. to meet demand, and employees are working extra shifts.

Even a 25- percent fee charged by Williams' real estate firm doesn't guarantee a profit for the broker for handling the private rental business, given the time-consuming process of matching out-of-towners with local owners.

"If we do break even we will come out ahead because we've raised our image in the market," Williams said. "But it's not something we're going to make any money out of."

If hotel rooms and boat slips are pricey but legal in Jacksonville, the NFL also contends each year with schemes that are neither cheap nor legal. Each year, law enforcement officials confiscate about $1 million worth of bootleg souvenirs produced without the NFL's sponsorship.

Some of the bootleg items are laughably bad, like jerseys with a player's name misspelled or colors that bleed out with the first washing. But the bootleggers are growing more sophisticated.

"At one point, it was people selling handmade T-shirts out of trunks of cars," said Brian McCarthy, an NFL spokesman. "Now we're seizing collectible stuff - bumper stickers, pins, pennants."

He added, "With the game's popularity, it's beginning earlier and earlier each year."

Shoppers in Detroit, where, Super Bowl XL will be played Feb. 5, 2006, may face a couple of special challenges next year, McCarthy added. Since Detroit hasn't hosted a Super Bowl since the 1982 game at the Pontiac Silverdome, many buyers may not be able to spot licensed material from counterfeit goods. And the city's proximity to Canada makes a crackdown on unauthorized goods more difficult.

The NFL also cautions consumers to beware of scams on the Internet for game tickets. The NFL frowns on any type of resale of its Super Bowl tickets, but professional ticket brokers say only resellers who are members of the National Association of Ticket Brokers can be trusted. A list of NATB members is available at www.natb.org.

"Unfortunately in many instances, it's buyer beware," McCarthy said. "If something seems too good to be true, it probably is."