It only took about 6 minutes Wednesday for the available Bears playoff tickets to be sold to fans who are not season ticket holders.
Many of those seats came at a pretty hefty price. And, depending on who the bears end up playing, their value could rise for the NFC division title game Sunday, January 16.
At 10 a.m. Wednesday only the lucky few were able to avoid screens that said they had been shut out. Bears playoffs tickets sold out for $107 to $559.
For the moment they're not necessarily garnering more than that on the secondary market.
At ticket broker StubHub Wednesday morning staff counseled patience. "Everybody worries that prices are going to skyrocket right away," said Eric Guller, StubHub. "And that is not usually the case. Sure they might go up, but you are going to have 24-48 hours warning."
So what's a good price?
On Craigslist, tickets in groups of 2 and 4, sometimes with parking passes, are being offered for anywhere from $300 to $500 or more. Judging by the amount of ads, though, that doesn't mean they're selling.
And, as ticket sales once again demonstrate the iron law of supply and demand, Micah Johnson sees a business opportunity.
"I would absolutely buy them," said Johnson. "I would pay, let's see... How much are they probably valued at, say $1,000? Ok, $500, and then I would sell them."
Gold Coast Tickets says they're puzzled by a lack of demand for Bears and Bulls tickets this season. Owner Max Waisvaisz says in 20 years he hasn't seen such lack of demand for a playoff team, perhaps because the Bears-Eagles game fell on Thanksgiving weekend and the Jets visited Soldier Field the day after Christmas.
Still, there's hope for a profitable start to the year.
Our ideal would be Philadelphia gets beat by the Packers, the Packers play Atlanta and beat Atlanta and we host an NFC Championship Game here in Chicago," Waisvisz said.
About 90 percent of the tickets go to Bears season ticket holders, and only a limited number of the remaining 10 percent were made available Wednesday. The Bears would not give an exact figure.
