Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Auction Results: Latin America, October 3, 2009 @Phillips

Phillips' Latin America sale took place last weekend in New York, and the photography included performed only marginally better than the photo lots in the Now sale in London a week before; the buy-in rate was slightly better, but still soft at over 45%, and the Total Sale Proceeds once again missed the total Low estimate by a decent margin.

I continue to be intrigued by this nascent strategy: can slicing the collector base into ever finer gradations based on subject matter, geography or other factors really grow the entire base and attract new clients, or are we all just looking at all the catalogues anyway? Can Phillips "make it up on volume", even if the specific sales don't individually bring in huge amounts? It will certainly be fascinating to watch.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 78
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $586600
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $836700
Total Lots Sold: 42
Total Lots Bought In: 36
Buy In %: 46.15%
Total Sale Proceeds: $480038

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 59
Low Sold: 32
Low Bought In: 27
Buy In %: 45.76%
Total Low Estimate: $315700
Total Low Sold: $153563

Mid Total Lots: 17
Mid Sold: 8
Mid Bought In: 9
Buy In %: 52.94%
Total Mid Estimate: $351000
Total Mid Sold: $161875

High Total Lots: 2
High Sold: 2
High Bought In: 0
Buy In %: 00.00%
Total High Estimate: $170000
Total High Sold: $164600

A whopping 97.62% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range, so the estimates were obviously appropriately conservative. There was only one surprise in this sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 109, Vik Muniz, Gummy Bears, 2002, at $6250

The top lot by High estimate was lot 192, Vik Muniz, Maria Callas (from Diamond Divas), 2004, with an estimate of $70000-90000; it was also the top outcome of the sale at $92500.

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Phillips De Pury & Company
450 West 15 Street
New York, NY 10011

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