The travails of selling up in a down market
ByWith Opening Day less than three months away, the Yankees have some real estate to sell. Seven of the team’s fancy luxury boxes remain vacant and a quarter of the 4000 highest priced premium seats are unsold as well. To that end, the Yanks have hired Prudential Douglas Elliman, a high-priced real estate firm, to help move some seats.
To me, this seems like an unnecessary move. The Yanks aren’t selling out the new stadium because the seats are disproportionately overpriced considering the current state of the U.S. economy. Once the markets rebound, the Yanks will have no problem selling out their 52,325-seat stadium. For now, though, if the Yanks don’t fill those seats, they may come dangerously close to missing out on that four-million attendance mark during their first in the new digs.
I don’t think it’s helped at all that in the past six months we’ve gone from having a ton of investment banks, many of whom sponsored the Yankees, to absolutely none at all.
I think it will be more telling to see how many empty upper deck and bleacher seats there are…
Yankees picked a bad year to astronomically raise prices, even if they’re not raised for every seat.
I was thinking about the stadium naming rights thing today… too bad they couldn’t name this the Polo Grounds.