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Online ticket sellers go for broke

02/25/2005

Those nonexistent Super Bowl tickets up for bid in the ether of cyberspace at an undetermined markup ran into a harsh reality Tuesday afternoon: eBay yanked them from the market.

Alpha Tickets of Alpharetta, Ga., was offering pairs of tickets to Super Bowl XL at Ford Field for as much as $11,225. Since tickets won't even be printed until late fall, I wondered in Tuesday's column about the wisdom and peril of buying any now.

Because it's a rule of nature that every story be somehow connected to Michigan, the broker who was selling them turns out to have spent his childhood in Bingham Farms. And because of a rule of eBay, his Super Bowl listings have been banished.

Selling tickets in advance of an event is OK, said eBay spokesman Hani Durzy, but only if you can deliver them within 30 days. It'll be more than 30 weeks before tickets for the next Super Bowl hit the printing press, so eBay crashed its mighty cyberfist upon the table and ordered Allen Raines to cut it out.

"We're not saying the sale was going to be fraudulent," Durzy stressed, and while he can't talk about specific sellers, Alpha has a history of happy online buyers.

The greater the time between payoff and kickoff, though, the more that can go wrong. "We want these things to be closed quickly," Durzy said.

Fine, said Raines. He's deeply sorry and he'll never do it again, until the next time he does it.

"It's a game of cat and mouse we brokers have to play with eBay," said Raines, 37. "Basically, every broker in the world is out there preselling tickets for every event that exists."

Sometimes, he said, one broker will rat out another for trying to sneak in advance orders among the 40 million items up for sale or auction on eBay. In this case, the snitch was me, though I didn't know that asking a few questions amounted to turning someone in.

"It's a brutal game," Raines said -- one he turned to four years ago after stints as a stockbroker and an equity and options trader.

As a member of the National Association of Ticket Brokers, Raines said, he would be honor-bound to refund 200 percent of the purchase price if he couldn't fill a Super Bowl order for which he was paid in advance. How much honor binds other people in his profession is debatable, but Raines will tell you he got pasted 2 1/2 weeks ago in Jacksonville.

Face value for Super Bowl XXIX tickets was $500 or $600. With feverish Philadelphia Eagles fans inflating the market, most brokers wound up filling orders for more than they charged in advance.

"That's why this 200 percent thing was instituted by the NATB," he said -- and instituted as well by the state of Georgia and several others, not including Michigan. Without the penalty, a broker could simply say, "Gee, sorry," refund some poor mope's money and leave him in the lurch, rather than come up with the tickets and absorb a smaller loss.

In the unlikely event anyone is feeling sorry for the brokers, Raines said he did very nicely at the previous Super Bowl in Houston. He also had a profitable week at the Ryder Cup in Bloomfield Township.

"I'd say 95 percent of the time we're making money on these orders," he said. The remaining 5 percent is split between breaking even and taking the occasional smack upside the head. "In the end it all works out, because the probabilities are in our favor."

As it turned out, he didn't sell any tickets for next February's game before eBay deflated the ball. He said that was fine, because as a broker, he's leery of Ford Field. That's actually a good sign for Detroit, because it means he's expecting throngs of overeager buyers.

To start with, even after the Lions expand the stadium's capacity from 64,500 seats to 70,000, there will be 13,000 fewer rumps in place than there were in Jacksonville.

"I don't care that it might be cold and icy," Raines said. "You get a couple of marquee teams in there, it's going to be a very high-priced ticket."

Beyond that, "What if the Lions got in?"

A good broker needs to take every possibility into account ... no matter how absurd it sounds.