Want to take out a loan at your credit union to buy season tickets to your favorite sports team? Good luck with that.
While many credit unions offer signature loans that could be used to buy season tickets for college or pro sports, only a few CUs actually offer them—a fact that baffled many sources who spoke with Credit Union Journal. The reason? Most of them say they simply never thought of it.
One credit union that does is Southern Mississippi FCU in Hattiesburg, Miss., which offers season ticket loans for Southern Miss football, basketball, baseball and soccer. The loans have terms up to six months, don’t carry any interest and require only a $10 processing fee, as well as automatic payment via payroll deduction, direct deposit or automatic transfer.
According to CEO John Harmond, demand for the loans—particularly the football tickets—varies each year.
“Southern Miss for the last couple of years has not had a very good football program, so the response has been less than it was in the past,” Harmond said. “Some years we may do 10, other years we may do 40 or 50 loans. It just varies and goes up or down based on the type of season the team has.”
Football tends to draw the biggest response, he said, in part because those tickets are more expensive than season tickets for other sports. Harmond didn’t have numbers on hand for this year, but said that the team may be better this year, which could translate into higher demand.
“The forecast from different football experts is that the university will be bowl-eligible this year,” he said. “They’re looking to be six and six, so that’s a real possibility this year. This would be the first time they’ve been eligible in several years—2001 was the last time they went to a bowl game.”
Aside from SMFCU, CU Journal was only able to track down one other credit union that offers season ticket loans—Partners CU Ltd in Liverpool, England, which offers season ticket loans for Liverpool FC supporters. Partners CU representatives did not respond to CU Journal’s requests for an interview.
Other institutions don’t offer season ticket loans, but have products that can be put toward the cost of tickets. Representatives at Michigan State University FCU in East Lansing, Mich., said the CU’s “Green and White Loan” could be used to pay for tickets if the member wanted to. Similarly, the credit union ran a loan promotion at the end of 2013 to help students afford the cost of tickets and airfare when MSU played in the Rose Bowl.
Why Not?
Plenty of consumers are season ticket holders for one sport or another, so why don’t more CUs offer those loans? Pat Simmons, lifestyle lending manager at Mountain America CU—and a University of Utah football season ticket holder—had a theory.
“From what I understand it’s because when most people buy or renew they do it by credit card, so there’s never really an issue of how they’re going to pay for them,” Simmons said. Additionally, many ticket offices—both pro and college—allow season tickets to be paid off in installments before the season begins with no interest due.
Plus, in many cases the product is so popular that there aren’t many tickets available to lend on. “The University of Utah has a 98% renewal rate on season tickets,” Simmons said, noting that ticket prices were raised when the school joined the Pac-12.
Southern Mississippi FCU’s Harmond suggested that many CUs don’t view season ticket loans as a lucrative product.
“It’s about giving back to the members and serving the community, and I think a lot of credit unions may have lost sight of some of that,” he said. “I hate to say that … but maybe they’ve just not thought about it as a way to give back to the members.”
Tom Becker, SVP of lending at Hanscom FCU in Massachusetts said that while his CU doesn’t offer season ticket loans, there might be a lot of interest for such a product in a major sports market like Boston. And if the loans go into default, he said, the members wouldn’t be hard to track down.
“You always know where they’re going to be on a particular date,” he quipped.
