The Yankees have seven luxury suites left to sell for next season, at $600,000 a pop. They haven’t sold one since at least August, citing slow demand due to the economy:
“There’s no getting away from the fact that the world is different than it was, so traffic slows,” chief operating officer Lonn Trost said Tuesday. “So you don’t have 10 people banging on the door. You may only have two people.”
Trost said in August that 44 of 51 suites priced at $600,000 to $850,000 had been committed and that the $650,000 and $850,000 suites had sold out.
“We’re entertaining proposals from different folks,” he said. “I’m not going to put them into the sold column until somebody sends me an e-mail and says, ‘Done.’ It’s so hard to say close when you get attorneys involved and you start fighting over terms, and we don’t want to change terms.”
$4.2 million is a small, but not insignificant, amount of money for the Yankees. But what’s more important is that this is the first sign of a clear a slowdown in corporate demand for premium ticket packages. This is what Larry Lucchino was concerned about back in June (which seems like ages ago).
There’s still a long way to go until April, but it will be interesting to see whether the Yankees have to cut their suite prices a bit. Remember that just a few weeks ago, the Mets sold out their inventory, and were openly frustrated that they may have priced too low. If the Yankees went down to $500,000, there would surely be a market there.
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