Our Story

STR Marketplace is a unique company with equally unique goals of providing a valuable customer service to fans, generating revenue for sports teams and venues, and increasing season ticket renewals for our partners.

Kyle Burks founded the company in 2006 after attempting to purchase season tickets for his local NFL team.  Kyle began by calling the team's tickets office where he learned that in order to purchase season tickets, he was required to first purchase Permanent Seat Licenses (PSLs) for the seats, but unfortunately all the team's PSLs were sold out. The only option was to purchase PSLs directly from a current PSL owner who was interested in selling.  With no system in place through the team, Kyle was forced to buy a classifieds ad in the Houston Chronicle with the hope of finding someone interested in selling their PSLs.  After a few weeks, Kyle finally received a call from a seller willing to sell 4 PSLs to Kyle for $20,000.  In order to complete the transaction, the seller required that Kyle bring a $20,000 cashier's check to the local shopping mall where they would exchange the cashier's check for the PSL transfer form completed and signed by the seller.  Needless to say, giving a $20,000 cashier's check to a complete stranger with only a promise that the transfer form was legitimate was extremely risky.  Fortunately, the story had a happy ending once Kyle received the letter from the ticket office confirming the successful transfer of the PSLs, but things could have turned out much differently with Kyle losing his money and the seller disappearing.

Kyle's experience led to an obvious question. Why didn't the team provide some type of service to help people buy and sell seat licenses? Unlike most individual game tickets, seat licenses often have a very high value which places a significant amount of risk on buyers and sellers in an uncontrolled market.

Wouldn't it be great if a team could provide a service that helps sellers and buyers connect, while putting safeguards in place to ensure both parties are protected against any possible fraud? This is exactly what STR Marketplace provides to teams and their fans. Today, STR Marketplace operates 18 team-branded online marketplaces for 14 clients including NFL teams, MLB teams and NASCAR venues. Our products now include seat licenses, seat location rights, wait list and rv/camping marketplaces. Our online marketplaces provide teams a valuable customer service resource, generate new sponsorship revenue and help increase season ticket renewal rates.