The New Way to Sell NCAA Basketball Tickets Like A Pro (2024)

Welcome to the 2024-2025 NCAA Basketball Season

It’s an exciting time of the year for NCAA Men’s Basketball season ticket holders, with the transfer portal and new class of recruits bringing excitement to conferences across the country. With so many games each season, the excitement and time commitment can create a desire or need to sell NCAA Basketball tickets.

The talent level across College Basketball has exploded, making every night an interesting ticket. NIL and the transfer portal have brought NCAA Basketball to the forefront of the sports world.

Key Dates for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Season

The time to sell NCAA Basketball tickets for the 2024-25 season kicks off when your team activates. Here are key regular season dates for the NCAAM calendar to get excited for and use for your ticket-selling strategies:

• 11/04/24: NCAA Men’s Basketball Tips Off
• 11/21/24: Legends Classic Begins
• 11/25/24: Maui Invitational Begins

When Do NCAA Men’s Basketball Conference Games Start?

Conference games begin in December or January. Here are when some of Division 1’s top conferences started last season:

• Big 10: 12/01/23
• ACC: 12/02/23
• Big East: 12/19/23
• Pac 12: 12/27/23
• MAC: 01/02/24
• Mountain West: 01/02/24
• WCC: 01/04/24
• Big 12: 01/06/24
• SEC: 01/06/24

When Do NCAA Men’s Basketball Conference Tournaments Start?

Conference tournaments begin in mid-March for most conferences. Here are last season’s start dates for some of Division 1’s top conferences:

• WCC: 03/07/24
• ACC: 03/12/24
• Big 12: 03/12/24
• Pac 12: 03/13/24
• Big 10: 03/13/24
• Big East: 03/13/24
• Mountain West: 03/13/24
• SEC: 03/13/24
• MAC: 03/14/24

When Does March Madness Start?

Here’s a breakdown of the 2024 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament schedule:

• Selection Sunday: 03/17/24
• March Madness Begins: 03/19/24
• Final Four Begins: 04/06/24
• NCAA Championship Game: 04/08/24

If you find this article useful, feel free to share it with fellow NCAAM fans!

The Best Way to Sell NCAA Basketball Tickets

List on Schedule Release Day.

• It’s a seller’s market.
• Early buyers will pay more.
• No impact from player injuries.
• Fan excitement peaks.

Most of your time should be spent on the schedule release day. Try to plan out the games you want to attend immediately and start to sell NCAA basketball tickets for everything else.

The NCAA is doing all the work to make sure everything is exciting about the next season, so we recommend you catch the wave of volume before it slows down.

If you’re a season ticket holder, we go into more detail in this below. In addition to listing with TiqAssist, which lists seats on 10+ marketplaces and guarantees the sale of tickets, scroll down for our top tips to sell NCAA Basketball season tickets.

How to Resell NCAA Men’s Basketball Tickets on a Resale Marketplace

Look at Similar Seats

You can price check your NCAA Men’s Basketball tickets by finding listings that are:

1) Similar or closer in distance to midcourt

2) Five rows behind you or closer to the floor

If you have seats near the home bench, look at seats on the home side of the court. The same goes for visitor-side seats. Seats on the side of the court with the player’s benches carry a slight premium, so don’t compare those seats to seats on the other side of the court.

Find the cheapest seats that meet the above criteria, then price above or below based on the below information.

Bundle 3+ seats together and get a premium.

It’s harder to find three or more seats together relative to a pair, so buyers need to generally pay a premium of 10-15% for three seats together. If you can sell five or six seats, you might command as much as a 30% premium over a pair.  Buyers looking for that many seats typically plan ahead, which means buying when prices are higher in the life cycle of a ticket.

If you have three or more seats and can’t find comparable seats to price against, consider looking at a comparable pair of seats and pricing 15-30% above that pair.

Compare the Ticket Marketplace Prices

Ticketmaster, Stubhub, SeatGeek and other marketplaces can have wildly different prices. Sometimes one marketplace doesn’t have much supply on hand, which can lead to unrealistically high prices that make it difficult to sell NCAA basketball tickets.

The marketplace with the higher number of listings for your team is likely to be a better proxy of the true market value of the tickets.

The Factors that Drive Prices Up/Down

Watch out for these factors, and you will be able to predict the price direction of tickets with much greater accuracy. We sort out these factors into negatives and positives. The negative factors can drive the price down, so you should likely price your tickets lower preemptively to get a sale before further selling pressure kicks in. On the opposite side, the positives are great for the price.

Negatives:

• Selling within one month of the game. The closer the game, the lower the prices will be in general
• Home team is likely not going to the playoffs or underperforming expectations
• Key injuries to either the home team or the visiting team
• Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday games. Monday being the worst, Tuesday second worst
• Low-resale value opponents
  • Low-performing, minimal legacy, doesn’t draw well on the road
• Games that conflict with high-profile professional games (or Sundays during the NFL season)
• Games that conflict with major university events

Positives:

• Selling more than one month from the game. The further away from the game, the more you can sell your tickets for in general
• Home team is performing to or better than the expectation going into the season
• Opponent is performing to or better than the expectation going into the season
• Great resale value opponents
  • Either they are a legacy team, high profile conference opponent, have high projected draft picks, superstars, a deep fanbase, or are a championship contender
• Friday/Saturday/Sunday games (Saturday being the best)

The main takeaway here is that you should sell NCAA Basketball tickets as soon as you can. Ticket factors like ‘great resale value opponents’ aren’t going to change throughout the College Basketball season. The health and performance of both teams are subject to change and can potentially tank how much you can sell NCAA Basketball tickets for.

How to Sell NCAA Basketball Season Tickets

Owning season tickets is a lot of work. Most NCAA Basketball season ticket holders can’t make it out to all the home games on the schedule. In addition to listing with TiqAssist, which lists seats on 10+ marketplaces and guarantees the sale of tickets, here are some of our top tips to sell NCAA Basketball season tickets:

List Season Tickets on “Release Day” of your team’s Schedule

Following this advice will help you maximize the price you can get for your tickets.

List your tickets as far out from the event as possible. On schedule release day, there will be significantly higher buyer volume which will allow for higher season ticket pricing. There will be plenty of die-hard fans or planners who want the certainty of having the tickets in hand, particularly for the hottest games of the year.

You’ll get a premium over the others who have tickets but haven’t gotten around to listing their tickets or are waiting until closer to the game when they know whether they can attend or not. That means at the schedule release, there’s extremely limited supply and very high demand, which leads to a seller’s market.

Additionally, you want to avoid negative factors that may come up and impact ticket pricing. For example, player injuries that happen on either the home team or the visiting team. Whether it’s a superstar that is injured or resting, that could reduce the value of the ticket in half or more.

If you are unable to list around the schedule release, we recommend selling at least five weeks in advance of the game. Why? Most sellers list one to four weeks before the game, so you’ll want to get out in front of these sellers before they flood the market with inventory.

Also, sellers start feeling the time crunch as the game nears, at which point it’s a race to the bottom as sellers undercut each other.

List early games and low-resale value opponents first

The earlier games typically see less hype, so you may want to consider listing these tickets lower than normal as these games have less buyer demand. If you know you are unlikely to attend these games, best to get out ahead of the falling prices and sell early.

Pay off your payment plan as soon as possible.

While a 0% interest payment plan seems great on the surface, you can’t list tickets that are not paid in full. Delaying reselling your listings can cost you significantly in the end via the lower resale prices that you are likely to encounter as the game nears.

The New Way to Manage NCAA Basketball Season Tickets

As exciting as NCAA Basketball is right now, we know most season ticket holders can’t make it out to all the home games on the schedule. Selling NCAA Basketball tickets through resale marketplaces is a necessity. That’s understandable – whether it’s weekday games that end too late at night, weekend commitments, or you need to resell the most valuable games to finance your season ticket investment.

Built for Sports Fans, By Sports Fans.

If you ever thought to yourself, “why do I spend so much time managing my tickets? Why isn’t there a solution for this?”

We thought the same thing, so we made TiqAssist.

We handle the process of unloading your unused seats and provide you with the best return on your sales. When you choose to work with us, you’ll enjoy a wide range of benefits that make NCAA Basketball season ticket resale fast, easy, and successful for you.

Your tickets reach 5x the potential buyers through simultaneous listing on Ticketmaster, StubHub, Seatgeek, VividSeats, Gametime, TickPick, and other exchanges. No accidental double-selling of tickets. No marketplace sells more than 20% of our tickets, underscoring how important it is to list on all the top marketplaces. Your ticket prices are automatically updated to sell for the highest price possible and you get a bird’s eye view with a dashboard of all your ticket listings in one place.

We use technology that prices your tickets based on real-time data, providing you with the most accurate price based on current demand level and many other factors. Our ticketing software keeps your prices competitive with others but still ensures you get the most from the sale. It takes into consideration seat quality, time of year, popularity of the visiting team, and other conditions, so you always get more money than you would if you tried to sell the tickets yourself. On average, users earn 10-15% more using TiqAssist than they would by handling the sale on their own.

On top of all this, TiqAssist guarantees that your ticket will sell. So you can have complete peace of mind and never lose out over tickets.

Built for sports fans, by sports fans, we want you to spend less time on your tickets and more time enjoying the game along with us!

Summary

Reselling NCAA Men’s Basketball tickets has become more challenging as more marketplaces flood the resale market. Your best shot at success is listing as far in advance as possible and following our pricing tips above.

These tips were written by our selling experts. Follow us on social media to get more up-to-date information and the latest tips to give you an edge when selling tickets.

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To learn more about best practices around ticket resale and the top ticket resale marketplaces, read our blog article on “How to resell tickets online.“

If you enjoyed this article, you’ll love having TiqAssist’s selling experts and technology fully manage your ticket resale for you. Just click “List” for any game on your personalized dashboard and you’re done!

Learn more about how to sell NCAA Basketball tickets for your favorite teams here.