John Jessen, Head of Art Valuation and Due Diligence
How Family Offices can draw upon Data, as well as Deep Art Expertise to Mitigate Concentration Risk
Across the global wealth landscape, family offices are taking a harder look at their art and collectible holdings. Once considered static stores of value, these assets are now being assessed for risk, liquidity, and contribution to total wealth, and data is at the centre of this.
The latest Art Basel & UBS Global Art Market Report 2025 shows a clear pattern: while overall sales fell 12 % last year, transaction volumes increased at lower price points, and the top end of the market weakened sharply. Meanwhile, Deloitte’s 9th Art & Finance Report confirms that over half of wealth managers now integrate art into consolidated wealth reporting, reflecting growing demand for transparency and portfolio-level analysis.
The Challenge for Family Offices
Many family offices today face similar risk concentrations:
Artist and market exposure heavily weighted to a few names or regions
Liquidity risk in high-value, low-turnover works
Lack of integration between collectibles and wealth reporting
Limited scenario insight when markets shift
Without reliable, comparable data, these risks remain difficult to quantify and harder still to manage proactively.
How Overstone Provides Solutions
From Structuring Collection Data, to Combining Human Expertise with AI and the Benefits this creates. The first task that Overstone undertakes for a client is to organise and structure information on every asset in any given collection. Not every collector pays attention to this. While some may catalogue their works in an Excel spreadsheet, others may just keep old invoices in a box. Overstone’s Large Language Models efficiently parse this data so that algorithms can begin to generate data outputs. Of course AI cannot (yet) value art, as it does not have an emotional response to a work of art. Overstone valuations and exhaustive due diligence are conducted by in-house USPAP accredited art specialists. The unique combination of the human in the loop working alongside with AI, delivers accuracy, reliability, speed and scale. Actionable data transforms a hitherto opaque passion asset by unlocking it into a financial asset.
Overstone’s SaaS platform has reinvented how family offices manage and monitor their collectibles (fine art, classic cars, watches and fine wines). Through data-driven heat maps, analytics, quarterly mark-to-market re-valuations and liquidity scoring, Overstone’s clients can visualise concentration across artists, periods, and geographies, identifying where exposure is excessive or where value is locked in illiquid segments.
Scenario analysis tools allow families and advisors to model potential portfolios within their collections to consider targeted due diligence, re-valuation of certain works within a collection, assessing which assets to liquidate, selecting the best performing auction house for a particular artist, analysing insurance values and LTV and more. Overstone’s proprietary liquidity scores also help determine which works could be sold or collateralised efficiently, providing genuine financial optionality.
Most notably, Overstone’s integration with Addepar represents a breakthrough in wealth reporting, the first platform to seamlessly embed art and collectibles into institutional-grade wealth reports. This provides family offices with a single view of total wealth, where art is tracked, valued, and stress-tested alongside equities, real estate, and alternative assets.
From Passion to Performance
As the art market becomes increasingly data-transparent, family offices are moving from passive holding to active management of their collections. Overstone equips them with actionable intelligence, enabling informed diversification, calculated liquidity planning, and a disciplined approach to preserving cultural and financial legacy. With the insights gained from the data and analytics generated by Overstone, we can connect collectors with art-secured lenders, estate planners, art insurers and more, thus providing an end-to-end solution for a family’s collectibles.
