Art Appraisal • Art Valuation for Insurance, by Elephants and Castles on Jul 3, 2024 17:54:55 GMT 1, I've worked on many appraisals and helped on Insurance with art collections over there years including my own. I hope this helps:

• You can normally work out a group rate for larger collections of pieces.
• You can take your own photos of the pieces and document the specs / dimensions on a spreadsheet and hand this over to the appraiser and ask for a reduction in their rates.
• I would always do a bit of due diligence first on current market values high and low price spread and add that.
• Find an appraiser who has knowledge of the artists in your collection.
• You'll want the final price for each piece to be higher than current market ( replacement value ) the reason being an insurance company will always want to pay less so expect to have a fight with them, I've had first hand experience of this.
• If you the piece are at home you need to make your home contents insurance agent aware as you'll probably need a balloon policy through a 3rd party insurance company. They'll require home security with a document from the security company stating the property is covered with alarms / smoke detection.
• No US insurance company will insure a collection without a proper documented appraisal and if they say they will be very skeptical.
• You'll want to update your appraisal every 2 years and you should be able to pay the original appraiser a small fee to update and sign again if you do the above guides for updating values / photos etc.
• As an example I recently helped a collector appraise and insure 15 pieces, the initial quote was $4500 - $6500 we did the photos and documents on our side with some values that the appraiser checked and got it down to $2500. Insurance for the year came in just shy of $5000.


Hope that helps!