Bidding for art at US$10k?

Posted on May 3, 2020

Background

Global Art Market

The global art market, valued at $67.4 billion, has never been more global and accessible. Yet, even highly experienced art lovers find auctions intimidating.

Auction houses are one of the biggest drivers of the art market, generating about 20% of annual sales. The powerhouses: Christie’s and Sotheby’s, account for more than 40% of auction sales.

Source: CNBC

Rear view of group of business people with signs buying a painting during the auction

Art Scene

In April 2020, George Condo's Antipodal Reunion (2005) sold for US$1.2 million at an online Sotheby's auction. This figure is not only astonishing for a contemporary artist alive, it's also made a new record for online auction sales!

If we are a newcomer to art investments, where do we start? Let's explore this by figuring out what US$10,000 can get us at the recent auctions hosted by Sotheby's.

Web Scraping - Selenium

The Sotheby's auction home page contains a summary of auctions in reverse chronological order with infinite scrolling. As such we'll be using a combination of Selenium and ChromeDriver for scraping. We have limited our scope to Contemporary Art and Impressionist & Modern Art from 2018 to 2020 for this exercise.

Ticket to Entry

With US$10,000 on hand, let's take a look at the universe of items available to us at the price range from USD1,000 to USD15,000.

Starting bids range from US$3,000 to US$5,000 with Hong Kong having the lowest bar to entry finishing with London being the most expensive to get one's feet into. Average price looks quite close across cities.

Great news! Now that we've got enough cash for our first bid, what's our chance of ending up with an item after all the bidding?

Let's take a closer look at the number of pieces sold at each of the price points.

There are a good amount of items within the range of US$1,000 to US$15,000, with most items sold between US$2,000 to US$4,000.

In terms of volume of items available, New York and London took the lead,

followed by Hong Kong. Although pieces seems to be within reach with our budget, don't forget the fierce competition in the process of bidding.

After all, it's a group of passionate people locked in a room fighting for something close to their hearts!

Bidding behavior across major hubs

Let's visualize the bidding actions with the help of the following scatterplots, which summarize the number of bids which took place at each starting bid and final sales price points across cities.

The table below them shows average price to estimates ratio.

Our findings:

  • There are a lot of bidding action in New York at the lower end of the starting bid, however 50% of the sales were closed at a range between US$9,000 and US$14,000.
  • At 2x average price to estimate ratio, Hong Kong offers a good spectrum of items within the US$2,500 to US$7,500 starting bid range, with most of its final sales end up somewhere between US$7,000 to US$12,000.
  • London has starting bid spread all over the place, where final sales price range seems out of our reach.
  • Paris and Milan, although may offer some price bargains, seems to be a smaller market where probability of pieces that meets our taste is lower.

Where should we start?

Hong Kong, with an average price to estimate ratio of 2, seems to be a good place to start if we were to put in our first bid on items between US$4,000 to US$6,000, we'll likely happily end up with a piece at US$8,000 to US$10,000.

However, at the end of the day, there's no promise! If we don't get to bring home some an uplifting piece of art, the thrill of going through our first auction is definitely a unique experience in itself!

If the auction lets you down, there might as well be an emerging artist around you waiting to be discovered. How about investing the US$10,000 to support your newly found local artist? 

About Author

Deborah Leong

Deborah is a data scientist with 10+ years of domain expertise in Asset Management. She's a Certified Public Accountant with acute acumen for financial data analysis and an avid painter with natural intuition in pattern recognition. She believes...
View all posts by Deborah Leong >

Leave a Comment

No comments found.

View Posts by Categories


Our Recent Popular Posts


View Posts by Tags

#python #trainwithnycdsa 2019 2020 Revenue 3-points agriculture air quality airbnb airline alcohol Alex Baransky algorithm alumni Alumni Interview Alumni Reviews Alumni Spotlight alumni story Alumnus ames dataset ames housing dataset apartment rent API Application artist aws bank loans beautiful soup Best Bootcamp Best Data Science 2019 Best Data Science Bootcamp Best Data Science Bootcamp 2020 Best Ranked Big Data Book Launch Book-Signing bootcamp Bootcamp Alumni Bootcamp Prep boston safety Bundles cake recipe California Cancer Research capstone car price Career Career Day citibike classic cars classpass clustering Coding Course Demo Course Report covid 19 credit credit card crime frequency crops D3.js data data analysis Data Analyst data analytics data for tripadvisor reviews data science Data Science Academy Data Science Bootcamp Data science jobs Data Science Reviews Data Scientist Data Scientist Jobs data visualization database Deep Learning Demo Day Discount disney dplyr drug data e-commerce economy employee employee burnout employer networking environment feature engineering Finance Financial Data Science fitness studio Flask flight delay gbm Get Hired ggplot2 googleVis H20 Hadoop hallmark holiday movie happiness healthcare frauds higgs boson Hiring hiring partner events Hiring Partners hotels housing housing data housing predictions housing price hy-vee Income Industry Experts Injuries Instructor Blog Instructor Interview insurance italki Job Job Placement Jobs Jon Krohn JP Morgan Chase Kaggle Kickstarter las vegas airport lasso regression Lead Data Scienctist Lead Data Scientist leaflet league linear regression Logistic Regression machine learning Maps market matplotlib Medical Research Meet the team meetup methal health miami beach movie music Napoli NBA netflix Networking neural network Neural networks New Courses NHL nlp NYC NYC Data Science nyc data science academy NYC Open Data nyc property NYCDSA NYCDSA Alumni Online Online Bootcamp Online Training Open Data painter pandas Part-time performance phoenix pollutants Portfolio Development precision measurement prediction Prework Programming public safety PwC python Python Data Analysis python machine learning python scrapy python web scraping python webscraping Python Workshop R R Data Analysis R language R Programming R Shiny r studio R Visualization R Workshop R-bloggers random forest Ranking recommendation recommendation system regression Remote remote data science bootcamp Scrapy scrapy visualization seaborn seafood type Selenium sentiment analysis sentiment classification Shiny Shiny Dashboard Spark Special Special Summer Sports statistics streaming Student Interview Student Showcase SVM Switchup Tableau teachers team team performance TensorFlow Testimonial tf-idf Top Data Science Bootcamp Top manufacturing companies Transfers tweets twitter videos visualization wallstreet wallstreetbets web scraping Weekend Course What to expect whiskey whiskeyadvocate wildfire word cloud word2vec XGBoost yelp youtube trending ZORI