It’s reached the fourth quarter for bargain hunters eyeing Super Bowl tickets.
The market’s low end should begin its inevitable bottoming out on Friday, with the cheapest ducats going between then and Sunday morning, secondary-ticket market analysts said.
The get-in price, the lowest possible for nosebleed seats at MetLife Stadium on Sunday, has been holding steady between $1,400 and $1,500 all week.
But with a healthy inventory of unsold tickets — more than 10,000 listed on aggregators TiqIQ and SeatGeek by Thursday afternoon — football fans can optimistically look forward to low-end seats for $1,000 if they can wait until Saturday or Sunday morning to pull the trigger.
“The New York fan base is a little more astute about buying tickets that others,” said Chris Matcovich of TiqIQ. “They know how the market works a little better, so they’re going to let it drop little more until it reaches their comfortable zone.”
In addition to the sales price, fans should also eye the remaining inventory, according to Will Flaherty of SeatGeek.
Once that number goes south of 4,000, that’s when consumers — willing to sit in the cold of MetLife Stadium on Sunday — should do a deal.
“At a certain point, you could keep waiting but that might only save you $50 or $60,” Flaherty said.
“If you get a deal in your range [and there’s less than 4,000 total tickets left] then you should probably jump on that.”
When MetLife Stadium was awarded the 2014 title game, ticket-market watchers automatically concluded this would be the most expensive ticket in Super Bowl history.
That’s not going to be the case.
The average secondary-market ticket sold on Wednesday was $2,017 — less than on the Wednesdays the three most immediate Super Bowls, in 2013 ($2,214 in New Orleans), 2012 ($3,032 in Indianapolis) and 2011 ($3,334 in Arlington, Texas), according to SeatGeek.
The average list price of a Super Bowl ticket on Thursday afternoon was $2,600.27, down 35.12 percent from the morning of the AFC and NFC title games, according to TiqIQ.