Selling the ticket market short - anyone ever try this?

[Boner_18]

Here's how it works.

1. Pick an event you think will eventually sell for less (hyped up on news, you project player injury, etc.).
2. Post a listing online for tickets to said event in a general section and IMPORTANT price them lower than any other tic. E.g. Yankee Stadium section GS 415 row & seat TBD.
3. Excited buyer purchases your "ticket" since it's the lowest option.
4. Monitor the market and buy to cover a set of tickets when they fall below your sales price or the agreed upon delivery time is near.
5. Profit (or lose) by the margin of your listing and the tickets you purchase to fulfill the order.


Sounds like fun.

 

[fiveteamer]

I tried to buy two tickets on Saturday for something. Tickets go on sale at 12:00. I refresh right at 12:00, select two tickets at any price. Ticket master loads for like, 15 mins and then tells me there aren't any tickets. What kind of bullshit was that? These tickets will be selling for 5 times the face value on the open market, so there was a major crunch to get them. But that Ticketmaster system is all bullshit.

 

[Boner_18]

Yeah. Events theses days have like 3 presales and a regular onsale. Take out 15% for corporate perks and a standard arena has like 3-5k tickets each sale.

 

[roguejuror]

I am sure this is against the terms of most sites?

 

[Gilmartin]

I seriously love this idea. I had a ticket scalping micro business going for a little while; researched NFL and NHL teams' attendances and made a list of the ones that had at least 100% average attendance for each of the previous three seasons. Then I just camped out on Ticketmaster and bought the maximum number for each team. The margins were great, but the ticket limits were so minuscule that I got tired of it and stopped doing it.

I suspect that a lot of people already do what you mentioned, but if you were selective enough, you could still probably grind out a good profit, even with the StubHub commission. I know StubHub has an API; not sure if it's read only or if you can actually post tickets for sale through it, but if the latter, you could build a ticket shorting bot that would follow your time value calculations and post (and un-post) ticket offers automatically.

 

[Boner_18]

I'm with you gil.. I'm thinking of giving it a try.with late season MLB.. I couldnt find any stubhub restrictions...