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Sotheby’s Billion-Dollar Real Estate Play

On a year-end call, the auction house reported that fine art sales were down 31 percent last year, and luxury sales and real estate are now driving the company. And that $1 billion investment from Abu Dhabi last fall? Don’t call it a bailout…

Charles Stewart
The art industry—especially the art advisors, collectors, and fiduciaries who place estates at auction—has been focused on the fee structure that Sotheby’s announced a year ago. Indeed, the sparse offerings at auction in the autumn made it clear that the new fee arrangement was hampering the company’s ability to compete. Photo: Josep Lago/AFP/Getty Images
Marion Maneker
January 26, 2025

Last Thursday, I listened to Sotheby’s call presenting their 2024 results—$6 billion in sales, divided between $4.6 billion in auctions and $1.4 billion in private sales—and wondered what I was meant to be taking away. Sotheby’s told us the overall number was down 23 percent from the year before, and that the composition of sales was 63 percent fine art and 37 percent luxury. Again and again, we were told how luxury sales—$2.2 billion in “consolidated sales” this year, above $2 billion for the third year in a row—were driving the company. This point was made even starker when Sotheby’s revealed that fine art sales had fallen 31 percent from 2023 to 2024, while luxury sales had pulled back by only 4 percent.