Warriors’ new arena gives some season-ticket holders sticker shock

The Chase Center, located in the Mission Bay district of San Francisco, will be the future home of the Golden State Warriors. The 18,000 seat arena will also host entertainment events. These computer-generated renderings show an approximation of how the finished arena will look. It's expected to be completed in 2019. less The Chase Center, located in the Mission Bay district of San Francisco, will be the future home of the Golden State Warriors. The 18,000 seat arena will also host entertainment events. These computer-generated ... more Photo: Courtesy Of The Golden State Warriors, Courtesy Of The Golden State Warriors Photo: Courtesy Of The Golden State Warriors, Courtesy Of The Golden State Warriors Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Warriors’ new arena gives some season-ticket holders sticker shock 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

After 45 seasons parked in prime seats at Warriors home games, close enough to yell instructions to Golden State’s coach, David Smith will be walking away from his two season tickets when the Warriors move to their new Chase Center arena the season after next.

Smith, a Warriors’ season-ticket holder since 1974, recently attended a sales presentation for Chase tickets. He walked in with the intention of writing a check, but walked out opting not to buy. His fan flame was snuffed out, he said, by a confusing presentation and other misgivings, including the cost.

Similar tales of woe have begun to surface, but the Warriors insist the walk-away fans are far outnumbered by season-ticket holders who are happily making the purchase of seats at Chase Center.

The Warriors, three weeks into their sales campaign, told The Chronicle on Thursday that they had made their in-house sales presentation to about 200 groups of seat holders, and, said Warriors’ Senior Vice President of Business Development Brandon Schneider, “The response thus far has been amazing. It’s actually better than we thought.”

Currently, there are 43,000 potential season-ticket holders on the wait list, the team said.

Schneider declined to provide numbers, but a source familiar with Bay Area sports marketing said the Warriors’ renewal rate is significantly higher than what the 49ers experienced when they moved from Candlestick Park in San Francisco to Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.

The upside for a season-ticket holder weighing the move from Oracle in Oakland to Chase in San Francisco is obvious: Maintaining ties with a team that has become the hottest and coolest show in sports.

The downside includes concerns over traffic, parking and price.

“The price of the tickets (at Chase) is the deal-breaker,” said Jerry Barrish, a San Francisco sculptor and holder of two Warriors’ season tickets.

There is much curiosity over how much tickets will cost in the Warriors’ new home. The Warriors aren’t releasing those numbers, but some info has leaked out.

Smith and Barrish, for instance, pay $370 per ticket, per game, at Oracle. They benefit from a loyalty break given to longtime ticket holders. A new buyer for that same seat at Oracle pays $515, according to the Warriors.

Photo: Mason Trinca, Special To The Chronicle CEO & Founder of Mediasmith, David L. Smith, wears his favorite...

At Chase, a similar seat, five rows higher due to a change in courtside seating, will cost $600 per game, and will not include the VIP parking that season-ticket holders now receive with their seats, according to Smith. At Chase there will be no more grandfather breaks for the long-timers. So one $600 seat at Chase will cost $26,400 for the 2019-20 season, for 41 regular-season games and three preseason games, if you do the math.

Along with the cost of those $600 premium seats, there is an additional $35,000, one-time per-seat, refundable “membership” fee, the team confirmed. It’s basically a loan that the Warriors will repay to season-ticket holders in 30 years, with no interest accrued.

Seat licensing is a common practice in sports, especially in new arenas and stadiums, but typically the PSL — personal seat license — is simply a one-time charge, with no type of refund. The Warriors are believed to be the first team to structure the fee as a loan to the team, to be repaid in full, albeit 30 years later with no interest.

That $35,000 membership for the $600 seats is an $8,000 discount over the fee first-time ticket buyers will pay for that same seat at Chase. The Warriors say that for more than half the seats in their new home, the membership fee will be less than $15,000, and payment of that fee can be financed.

Ticket prices mentioned here are for the first season at Chase. The team says Oracle seat owners who move to Chase will be guaranteed their seat prices won’t rise more than 7.5 percent per season at the new arena.

These terms are a long cry from 1965, when Barrish jumped on the Warriors’ bandwagon. Back then, if he wasn’t using his two seats, he couldn’t give them away. Now he can’t afford them, and doesn’t want to when he looks at the schedule and sees so many games against teams badly overmatched by the mighty Warriors.

“I’m going to pay $1,200 for two tickets to watch the Phoenix Suns play?” Barrish asks. “It’s just insane, absolutely insane.”

Is it insanity, or simply modern economics? Or both?

Once Warriors’ owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber decided their team needed a new arena, in San Francisco — and they seemingly made that decision before they bought the team in 2010 — they also knew who would pay for it: the fans.

“Especially in California, forget about (government) subsidies,” said Andy Dolich, a Bay Area sports marketing expert who has worked for the 49ers and A’s and teaches at Stanford. Citing heavy government assistance in building sports venues in states like Pennsylvania, Dolich said, “Those days have long since disappeared in California. If you want to build anything, you build it yourself, meaning, you borrow the money (from banks) and you get it back from your fans.”

That was the route taken by the Giants and 49ers. Their new venues came with steep rises in ticket prices, but Dolich said there’s no chance that Bay Area sports fans are tapped out financially.

“The Bay Area is quadruple-platinum when you think about the money that’s in this marketplace,” Dolich said. “Super-platinum. The level of disposable income is more disposable than ever.

“How could anyone possibly believe that even with the (Warriors’ ticket-price) increases and the way they’re being sold, that the market would do anything other than say, ‘Wow, the license is only $35,000 per seat? I thought it was going to be expensive. Can I get it with wire wheels?’”

If the ticket prices seem high, the Warriors would like to point out that the taxpayers aren’t footing the bill.

“We’re building this arena, which will be a huge asset to the city,” noted Schneider. “It’s not just Warriors’ fans. It’s concerts and other events, a whole district that will have cultural events. And the city, the public, is paying zero.”

That’s the exact amount that at least some season-ticket holders are choosing to pay when the team moves. Like Barrish, the artist.

Referring to the $35,000 that would come back to him 30 years hence, Barrish, who will be 80 when Chase opens, said, “They kept telling me I could leave it to my estate, but that’s not going to help me very much. I’m on a fixed income. I love the team, I love the game, I’m a fourth-generation San Franciscan. I’m not a corporation. They just priced me out, that’s all.”

Smith, the media-buying CEO, was put off by the sales presentation, which he likened to a time-share pressure sale. He believes the offer could have been much more flexible to accommodate the varying needs of the seat holders within Smith’s bloc.

Schneider said Smith merely misunderstood many of the terms of the deal presented to his group. If so, Smith would counter that there are many layers and aspects of the purchase of tickets and membership at Chase. “It boggled our minds,” said Smith of the presentation.

Barrish said if he had opted in, he would have been required to sign a 35-page contract that day to seal the deal. Barrish said you could take the contract home to study, but while you’re mulling the deal, your prime seats are being offered to the next group on the priority list. (The Warriors say they provided the contracts to prospective buyers ahead of the sales meetings.)

Smith said he walked into the presentation prepared to buy, if he could get his buy-in share — as one of four people going in on two seats — down to about $12,500.

Smith said, “I said to myself, ‘I will do this, and argue with my wife when I get home, or hide it in my expense account or something.’ ”

Photo: Mason Trinca, Special To The Chronicle David L. Smith's San Francisco Chronicle front cover of Golden...

But he couldn’t sync his needs with the sales requirements.

“I really feel like I lost a good friend, somehow,” Smith said. “I still feel majorly bummed. People say, ‘Are you excited (about the new arena)?’ No, I can’t be excited, because I had to pass. So it’s a wound that will continue to be picked at for a while. But I’m old enough to know that all things end, right?”

Not for the vast majority of current ticket holders, according to the Warriors. And the ones who are buying in can feel lucky that the Warriors are possibly selling those Chase tickets for less than the market could command.

“We probably could have charged more,” Schneider said, “but we want our loyal fans to be involved with the team.”