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Information

Toronto Maple Leaf and Raptor Licenses for Sale

Please note that we have now handled many Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE) Seat License agreements. After over 100 license transactions and we know the proper way to handle the MLSE Personal Seat Licenses (PSL) transfers. The fact that we have handled more licenses than anyone is a tribute to our way of ensuring both the buyers and the sellers are protected. 

In some cases we were the buyers, some cases we were the sellers, and in other cases we acted as the broker between the buyer and seller. If you need to sell your seat license we do have a waiting list of buyers for many different seat sections. However since we act as a broker we know the marketplace and the fair market value, we will not act for anyone trying to sell the license way over the fair market value. We want both the seller and the buyer do walk away believing that a fair price was achieved for both the buyers and the sellers for the seat license.

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Sellers       Please note we will require the following information before we list your license for sale 1. We need to see a copy of your Personal Seat License that was issued by MLSE; it can be faxed to us or scanned and emailed to us. If you don’t have it please contact MLSE and arrange to receive a copy of it. Should MLSE not have a copy in their files, ask MLSE to issue you a letter or email that your PSL account is in good standing and is able to be transferred. 2. We need to see a copy of your last season ticket invoice; we need this information to ensure that we list your PSL accurately including the current season ticket costs. 3. At some point we will be making an appointment at your place of business to verify that you are authorized to deal with the seat license sale 4. If the sale is being processed from a company name, we will need two senior managers or owners to sign the PSL transfer form, please ensure you have those people ready to sign the form. 5. You will need to contact MLSE and request a seat license transfer form, we will provide the seller with the right phone number and contact at MLSE, and you will need to fax or email us a copy of the transfer form as further proof of your ownership. 6. Think long and hard before you agree to sell your seat license, once we start the process of the seat license transfer by having you sign the PSL transfer form, which is done once we have a buyer, who has provided us with a deposit cheque, there is no going back on the transfer. Should you think you may need to change your mind, please don’t list the license for sale. Wait until you have clearly decided to list the license for sale. 7. You need to read all the FAQ's before contacting us; you will understand the proper procedure much better by reading the FAQ's.

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Buyers        Please note we require the following from you before we accept any offers   1. We need you to read the FAQ's before contacting us; it will save you a lot of time on the phone with us if you understand the process before you email or call us. 2. Please; offering a low ball offer will normally just upset the seller, and will not lead to a sale, the seller will move their price down on our website if that individual is anxious to sell. You can certainly email us to indicate that should the price point fall on a certain license to a certain level to contact you at that time . 3. Please note that we carefully screen any sellers by also making contact with Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment to ensure the seller's account is in good standing and the seller is a legit PSL holder. Lange will 100% guarantee that any funds you provide for a seat license is protected, should the seller be unable to complete the transaction we will 100% refund any funds you have provided. 4. We ask that you carefully read the description of the seat licenses, since in some cases we are selling Leaf only, some cases Leaf/Raptors club seats, and in some cases Raptor only.

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Frequently Ask Questions

         Updated April 29th, 2009

Question Number One:

Why would anyone want to purchase a seat license?

The waiting period for Leaf Season Tickets is approximately 20 years and has over 4,000 names on the list. Since the whole ACC is now licensed for the right to purchase Leaf season tickets, the only real way to get season tickets without using a ticket broker or using the services of an exchange service like www.eTorontotickets.com is to purchase a seat license. Please note the following; we don’t recommend to anyone to use a bank loan, or line of credit to purchase a seat license as an investment. You should only purchase a seat license because you or your company has too much cash sitting around and you don’t know what else to do with it. You can purchase season tickets through a reliable source such as Lange Ticket Exchange (web site www.eTorontotickets.com ) for about $2700 to $3500 over face value. If you purchase a gold seat license for $65,000, it would take 22 years of paying the extra fees that a reliable source like Lange Ticket Exchange would charge, but if you are sitting on cash, and wish to lock in on a seat location then a seat license would make sense for you.  

Question Number Two:

Is owning a seat license a good or even better still a great investment?

First if you can put a seat license in a company name, it means you get to write off the license as an asset over a 3 to 5 year period, (please consult with your CA to confirm) plus you get to write off the gst on the seat license as a tax thru for immediate write off on the gst portion of the purchase of a seat license. You also as a business get to write off the annual season ticket purchase for entertaining purposes.  So if your company is sitting on cash and looking for a way to write down your company’s tax burden I would consider a seat license as a great investment.

For individuals, if you are sitting on a pile of cash and don’t need to invest in other things, such as your own RSP’s, your mortgage is paid off, your kids education funds are taken care of, then yes it’s a possible reasonable investment. But personally I don’t recommend to anyone that you should purchase a seat license as a personal investment unless you have taken care of the above mentioned items first.

Please note that licenses in the lower bowl have certainly dropped in value over the past 12 months, as companies and individuals needed to sell off the PSL, and us finding it more difficult to sell the lower bowls at prices that had certainly moved upward. We have found however prices for the upper bowl have maintained or come down slightly, but not to the level in percentage that the lower bowls have dropped.

Question Number Three:

How did Lange get so involved in a seat licenses?

A long story, but so I don’t have to repeat it on the phone like I do with every client I will reveal it here. I was getting my season tickets thru a long time friend, who owned 4 gold seats at the Air Canada Centre, and I paid him a $10 over face value for each ticket, and I shared them with 3 other buddies of mine that used them for their business. One day my friend that owned the season tickets came into my office and explained he wished to sell his seat license as he needed the money for some reason. He gave me a few days to do some research on the value of the license, and I purchased them at that time for $120,000. I went to my buddies and explained that since I just invested $120,000 on those season ticket rights, I needed to charge them $30 per ticket, which meant I received $30 x 4 (the number of tickets per game) = $120 x 45 (the number of home games the leafs play per season including pre-season), which on the surface means I was making $5,400. But since the invoice cost of the season tickets are approx. $10 below face value, I was actually making $40 per ticket x 4 =$160 x 45 = $7,200 on my $120,000 investment. Since the bank was only giving me 2% on my money in the bank, this was a great investment. Please note, I did it thru my business which means I did record the purchase as an asset, I did show the purchase of the season tickets not for entertainment purpose but for a normal business transaction, and I showed the sale of the season tickets as a proper recorded credit on the balance sheet as well. We did not do the above to avoid, or defer taxes; in fact I had to pay corporate taxes on the profit we made, which reduces the return on the investment.

 

I then had other clients that wanted to purchase season tickets, and we went and purchased other seat licenses, including Platinum’s, other gold seats, Air Canada Clubs, reds, greens, and purples. The company was sitting on some cash and we didn't have another purpose of the money, and we then started the ticket exchange service, Lange Ticket Exchange, which many of you may recognize as www.etorontotickets.com . Then a couple of years later we wanted to purchase a new building for our main business, Lange Transportation and we started to sell our excess seat licenses to raise the capital necessary to purchase an almost 70,000 sq ft building. If you go to www.etorontotickets.com and read the section “about us” you can read the story on how we took a 30 year old building and did a lot of renovations to it including Canada’s first retrofitted “geothermal” building. This means we don’t use fossil fuels to heat or air-condition the building but use Mother Earth and modern technology with heat exchange units to heat and air-condition the entire building. So in the process of purchasing and then selling the seat licenses from MLSE is how we become experts in the selling and buying of seat licenses.

Question Number Four:

Why do you - Lange continue to sell, purchase or broker seat licenses?

When we are asked to assist someone in selling their license, we post them on this web site, we do the posting at a $25 admin fee, however we have a further agreement with the seller that we will receive a fee of at least $2,500 plus gst from the sale of the seat license. So if the license is posted at $50,000 plus gst, we at Lange will be paid at least $2,500 plus gst out of those funds received. So the reason we continue to act on behalf of buyers and sellers is that we do charge for our services.  We also get some situations where a seller needs to sell them immediately due to urgent cash flow requirements and Lange is in a position to purchase outright the seat license if the price is right. 

Please note when you purchase a seat license, MLSE does require that you do not re-sell them for a one year period. So when Lange purchases a seat license we understand clearly we are forced to hold the seat license for a one year period and cannot flip them for a quick profit. If you are looking to sell a license, please email us and provide some information about the location, row, seat numbers and we can give you a free estimate on the value of the license and the fee we would collect once we have sold the license. In order to provide the free estimate we also require a daytime phone number to be able to contact you for further information.  We will only post the seat license on our web site once we have received the $25 admin fee.

 

Question Number Five:

Why do you charge a $25 administration fee for posting?

We were getting a number of season ticket holders asking us to sell their seat license, and then when offers came in, seller’s remorse came along, and the seller decided not to sell. We feel by asking for a very reasonable $25 admin fee, the sellers will be sure to think long and hard about whether or not to sell or not before we waste our time in posting the license information. In some cases we also discovered the seller was acting on behalf of other family members who may not be in agreement in the selling of the license. The $25 is to ensure the seller is really a seller.

Question Number Six:

Does Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment charge any fees relating to the seat license transfer?

Yes, in two ways. If the seat license has already been purchased by the season ticket holder, then the legal dept of MLSE will actually do the seat transfer from the original seat holder to the new buyer. Presently the fee from MLSE is $500 plus 5% gst for a total of $525. This can be paid for by the seller, or the buyer but someone will have to pay the license transfer legal fees. We recommend the buyer pay the fee, so that if something is done wrong by MLSE legal dept. than the buyer will have better standing from a legal point if you paid for the service.

If the seat license has NOT been paid for by the season ticket holder, then MLSE will require the original seat license will still have to be paid for, remember the example I gave in FAQ number three, when I paid the seat holder $120,000 for his license, in actual fact $80,000 of that went to MLSE to pay for the original seat license, so the original season ticket holder actually took in $40,000 after he paid the $80,000 to MLSE.

All prices I quote for seat licenses, will have assumed the original seat license has been paid. If not, part of the buyer’s money will be made payable to MLSE and part to the original season ticket holder. For those that are fully paid the original license seat holder will get all of the funds.

Question Number Seven:

Does purchasing a seat license during a recessionary period really make sense?

If the seller really needs to sell, then like any opportunity its a great time to purchase a seat license, prices have come down in the lower bowl and certainly are not going up in the upper bowl, and some great opportunities may be there that will not be there at this price level in the next year or two. I make two promises when it comes to value at these price points, the first when the leafs and or raptors have a strong regular season, and the promise of play-off season is coming, prices will go up, the second is should either team go deep into the play-offs the value will continue to go up. By purchasing now, you buying licenses at prices we have not seen in the past 5 to 8 years.

Question Number Eight:

Why would I want to sell my license during a recessionary period?

That is the easiest question to answer; sellers have the following reasons to sell their license during these recessionary times.

a) You need the cash flow that a sale of a license may bring

b) You don’t need to commit further capital for the purchase of season tickets, which is a 45 game commitment

c) You want to free up your staff from having to deal with the 45 games and the management of those tickets

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Testimonials

I wanted to send a quick note to thank you for the professional and expeditious handling of my Raptor license transfer and sale. Everything happened as you outlined clearly to the purchaser and me, and nothing was left for misinterpretation. I appreciate your service and would recommend it to anyone.

Best regards, 

Gary Wilson, Master Lift

 

Thanks Eric for the package containing the cheques for the final transfer of the Personal Seat License, I am very impressed by your professionalism, it has been a pleasure, best wishes for 2010 and beyond.

DM

 

Any other questions, please e-mail me at ericl@langeshow.com

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