Auction houses selling ever more by private treaty
March 19 2012
There's an interesting snippet in the Antiques Trade Gazette showing how auction houses are conducting more and more private treaty sales. Last year, Sotheby's sold a total $4.9bn of works privately, up 7% from last year. That's 16.5% of their total sales.
The flipside of this, of course, is that an increasing number of works which appear at auction are not as 'fresh' as they might appear - freshness to market being a key driver of desirability at auction. In fact, such works are only in the auction because they have failed to sell when offered directly to clients as private treaty sales. I know of one major old master sold at auction in New York recently for $17 million (there's a clue), which had been touted around at prices of up to $50m before the sale. Not surprisingly, it generated only a single bid when it finally had its day at auction.
