Blue-chip art and luxury real estate go hand in hand in Miami

Behind a pair of curtains in the collectors lounge at Art Basel Miami Beach, a sparkling sea and a palm tree rustling in the breeze appear on a theatre-sized screen. A. Bradley Nelson, the chief marketing officer at Sotheby’s International Realty, stood before the serene vista. “I feel like I’m standing on the terrace right now looking out over the pool towards the ocean,” he says, “and we just wanted to give people that same experience.”

That particular view was filmed from a four-bedroom Collins Avenue condo, which Sotheby’s is currently offering for $13m. Every few minutes, a new view appears on the screen—looking out from a $49m duplex penthouse in Manhattan, for example, or a $26m waterfront home in Palm Beach—as part of a “curated” hour-long showcase of properties that “are well-designed for art collections”, Nelson says.

As a sponsor of the fair for the second year in a row, Sotheby’s has been hosting receptions and cocktail hours in the viewing room, and giving away VIP fair passes to top clients who may be interested in art. “High-net-worth individuals are very hard to reach, and Art Basel Miami Beach is a magnet for them,” Nelson says. “People who want to own a trophy piece of real estate are oftentimes interested in the art world.”

The synergy between art collecting and real estate is nothing new, especially in Miami, where some of the biggest art collectors—including Jorge Pérez and Craig Robins—are also some of its biggest real-estate developers. But the crossover has become more pronounced than ever as brokerages, including a Sotheby’s franchise in Miami, begin to establish in-house art advisories and developers increasingly take art into consideration when planning new construction.

In November the luxury real-estate firm The Agency, run by Mauricio Umansky of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills fame, opened The Agency Art House to advise its clients on collecting art.

“Blue-chip fine art has had high barriers to entry. Most of the real-estate world does not understand how the art world works,” says Arushi Kapoor, a Los Angeles-based art adviser and co-founder of The Agency Art House. Kapoor and her colleagues came to Miami to tour Art Basel with clients who recently bought properties from The Agency. “We’ve had collectors at the very high-end range that have bought $30m, $40m, $50m houses and they have a huge budget of $10m, $20m, $30m to do artworks in their house.”

The collectors are focused mainly on investment-grade art, Kapoor adds. “90% of the artworks that you see out in the world are aesthetic, and they’re very beautiful, but they’re not assets.”

Full-service agents

The Agency Art House can manage authentication, insurance, installation and other art-related concerns for its clients. “As soon as [clients] buy a house, we give them all of the resources to purchase artworks,” Kapoor says. But one of the company’s primary aims is education. She and Umansky, along with New York art-world broker Jonathan Travis, appeared yesterday on a panel titled Art and Real Estate: Where Creativity Meets Value, at the Untitled Art fair, where they discussed how “art is now a key player in real-estate development—boosting property values and shaping the identity of entire communities”.

Meanwhile, the luxury Florida real-estate firm One Sotheby’s International Realty is planning to open an in-house art advisory in the first quarter of 2025. “They’ve always used art in marketing,” says Sarah Jane Bruce, who will lead the operation along with her business partner Flavia Masetto, “and now when clients need an advisory service they can recommend someone to them that’s under their brand.” (Sotheby’s hosts a conversation with Bruce, titled Building Resilient Art Collections in Uncertain Markets, as part of Art Basel’s conversation programme on Saturday at 1pm.)

Mayi de la Vega, the founder and chief executive of One Sotheby’s, says she has been wanting to integrate an art advisory into the business for years. “It’s fun. It’s always been the right time to do it, but right now I’m able to focus on it.” Having advisers on staff ensures that they will be able to deliver “a lot of consistency and commitment” to clients.

De la Vega, who is herself a collector, says that the advisers will encourage clients to buy from Sotheby’s auction house, as well as galleries. She also hopes to focus in the future on showing work by emerging and mid-career artists at the company’s offices. This week, she partnered with The Bonnier Gallery in Miami to present an exhibition of work by blue-chip artists including Andy Warhol, John Baldessari, Wifredo Lam and Barbara Kruger at One Sotheby’s office in Miami Beach.

Building for art

Even before a property is sold—or built—art has grown into an increasingly crucial consideration for real-estate professionals.

Developers now tailor properties to the specific needs of collectors. “Climate control and lighting are the most important” factors for an art-friendly property, Nelson says. After that comes dehumidification, ultraviolet protection on the windows, hurricane protection (in Florida), and the dimensions of the freight elevator. Then there are the walls—they need to be load-bearing, and they cannot all be glass.

Others are making art a feature of the property itself. In 2016, Bruce and Masetto acquired millions of dollars worth of works by artists like Taryn Simon, Callum Innes and others for the lobbies of the developer Eduardo Costantini’s Oceana Bal Harbour condo complex, which is also home to two outdoor Jeff Koons sculptures. “The luxurious art collection was a big part of marketing it to clientele,” Bruce says.

One of the homes on view in the Sotheby’s lounge at Art Basel Miami Beach is a $40m Sea Island, Georgia, house that once belonged to the late architect John Portman, whose own sculptural installations remain on the grounds. “The house has been this source of public fascination,” Nelson says.

Meanwhile, Kapoor says that earlier this week she visited a client’s Indian Creek home, which came with outdoor sculptures on the property. The art, she says, “added to the reasons why they purchased the house”.

“A lot of agents and developers are coming to understand how art is also an asset, just like real estate,” she says.