Start with the number that matters most. In the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025, high-net-worth collectors reported allocating an average of 20% of their total wealth to art, up from 15% the year before(1). That is a five-point jump in a single survey cycle, and it happened in a market that most headlines called soft. To us, that gap between the narrative and the allocation is the whole story of where wealthy families are pointing their capital right now.

This piece is about the institutions sitting between those families and the market: the multi-family office. A single-family office serves one family. A multi-family office (MFO) runs a shared platform that serves many wealthy families at once, pooling the staff, the reporting systems, and the access(2). It is where most families not quite large enough to staff their own office go for institutional-grade advice. So how an MFO handles art tells you how the broad middle of serious wealth is approaching the asset class. We watch this closely, because we have said for years that our real competition is families. When the platforms that advise those families build art into the plan, the asset class is maturing.

How does a multi-family office handle art differently from a single-family office?

The structural difference between the two office types shows up directly in how each treats a collection. A single-family office, justified once a family's wealth runs into the hundreds of millions, can afford to hire a full-time curator, a registrar, and a collection manager and build art into the family balance sheet as a dedicated function(2). It carries that overhead for one client. Running a single-family office typically costs 1% to 2% of assets under management a year, which is why the structure only makes sense at scale(2).

A multi-family office cannot run that math for every client, so it does something different. It provides the strategic layer in-house, where art fits into the wealth, tax, and estate plan, then coordinates outside specialists for the market-facing work: the advisors, the appraisers, the insurers, the lenders, the auction houses(2). Deloitte has a clean term for this. It calls it the hybrid model, and its 2025 report names it as the approach family offices typically use for art(3). The MFO owns the structuring and the reporting. The art-market expertise gets rented.

That arrangement scales. It is the same logic behind the MFO itself, which spreads the cost of institutional infrastructure across many families instead of one(2). The largest bank-affiliated platforms, firms like Northern Trust and Rockefeller, run formal art and collectibles advisory groups that combine a small internal team with preferred external partners(4). The independent platforms more often coordinate the specialists from the outside. Either way, the family gets the access without carrying the staff.

How much do wealthy families actually allocate to art, and is the number rising?

The honest answer is that the reported allocation depends heavily on who is counted, and the figures sit in a wide band. We would not over-index on any single number. The trend across all of them points the same way.

At the top of the range, the Deloitte and ArtTactic Art and Finance Report 2025, ultra-high-net-worth collectors allocate an average of 10.4% of total wealth to art and collectibles (1). That figure surveys active collectors, so it runs high by construction. At the other end, broad family-office surveys that average across every office, including the many that hold no art at all, put art and antiques closer to 1% of the typical portfolio (5).

Reasonable people can argue about which of those numbers is right. The direction is not in dispute. The Art Basel and UBS report’s allocation rose from 15% to 20% from 2024 to 2025. When the price level softens and the share of wealth committed to it still climbs, collectors lean in. We read that as conviction holding through a correction.

A rising share of wealth does not require rising prices. It requires that families keep buying, and the spending data backs that up. Median expenditure on art held broadly stable through 2024, near the 50,000 dollar mark, even as the trophy segment cooled (7). The activity is concentrated lower in the market than the auction-night records suggest, which matters for an MFO: the works that clear in the 100,000 to a few million dollar range are where the real allocation work gets done, and where liquidity holds up best.

Why do multi-family offices treat art as a financial asset?

For most collectors, passion remains the stated top reason for buying(3). Underneath it, the financial logic has become explicit. Deloitte's 2025 report describes art as now holding a recognized place within holistic wealth-management strategies, with diversification and wealth preservation as primary motivations sitting right behind enjoyment(3). A growing share of family offices treat a collection as a treasury asset, something to be valued, reported, borrowed against, and planned around, even when the owner would still tell you they bought the painting because they loved it.

The clearest evidence is the lending. Art-secured lending, borrowing against a collection to free up cash without selling the work, is one of the most active corners of art and finance in 2025, with demand coming squarely from family offices and ultra-wealthy collectors(3)(8). A family that pledges its Rothko as collateral for a credit line is treating that work as a balance-sheet asset, and it is exactly the kind of service an MFO now coordinates. The due diligence behind it, independent appraisals and a check on provenance, is the rigor a serious allocator brings to a private equity commitment, pointed at a painting.

The asset earns that treatment because of what it does that the rest of the book cannot. The point is correlation, not direction. Real diversification means owning an asset largely indifferent to the forces driving everything else, and art's correlation to equities over long periods is roughly zero, with its highest correlation to gold around 0.1 to 0.2. The recent cycle showed it. Art sat out much of the equity rally while it worked through the excesses of 2021, then the global market grew again in 2025, with sales up about 4% to 59.6 billion dollars(9). Supply is the other half. Art is one of the few asset classes with continuously decreasing supply, because collectors donate works to museums and those works leave the market permanently. There are 21 Jackson Pollocks left in private hands. If you want one, you pay up. That is it. We think about art prices as a call option on the wealth of the top fraction of a percent, and the Deloitte estimate that 992 billion dollars of art and collectibles will change hands over the next decade is the same dynamic from the inheritance side(3).

The asset is not without friction. Art is illiquid, and valuation is hard, with no ticker and real disagreement between qualified appraisers on the same work. Those constraints are why a multi-family office treats art as a long-term, small allocation, and why we frame the sizing the same way: usually 2% to 10% of a portfolio, held over a 3 to 10 year horizon. Sized that way, the illiquidity is a feature you can live with.

Where is the advisory infrastructure heading?

For all the rising allocation, the supply of advice is not keeping pace, and that gap is the most interesting tension in the current data. The share of wealth managers offering art-related services actually fell, from 63% in 2023 to 51% in 2025(3). So as families commit more capital to art, nearly half of the firms that serve them still offer no formal support for it.

That gap is precisely why the hybrid model has become the default. Multi-family offices are not racing to build deep art departments in-house. They partner outward, coordinating external advisors, lenders, and data providers around a collection they hold and report on(3). The internal job is structuring and oversight. The external job is the market. The expertise that is expensive to build for one family is cheap to rent across many.

The longer arc points toward more allocation. The pool of art wealth among the ultra-wealthy keeps growing, the generational transfer keeps moving works onto the market, and the tools that let an MFO treat art like any other illiquid holding keep improving(3)(8). None of that guarantees any individual work appreciates. It does suggest the asset class is being absorbed into mainstream wealth management at the institutional level. When the platforms that advise families build art into the plan, the families follow.

The Bottom Line

  • High-net-worth collectors reported allocating 20% of their wealth to art in 2025, up from 15% a year earlier, even as total art sales stayed soft. The allocation is rising independently of the price level.
  • Multi-family offices typically use a hybrid model: in-house structuring, tax, and estate work, with outside advisors, appraisers, lenders, and auction houses coordinated for the market-facing tasks.
  • The framing has shifted toward art as an investment and treasury asset. Art-secured lending is one of the most active corners of art and finance in 2025, with demand led by family offices and ultra-wealthy collectors.
  • The case rests on low correlation to equities, continuously shrinking supply, and a generational wealth transfer that Deloitte estimates at 992 billion dollars over the next decade.
  • The advisory infrastructure is uneven. The share of wealth managers offering art services fell to 51% in 2025, part of why the rent-the-expertise hybrid model has become standard.

Sources

  1. UBS. "Art Market Research: Key Findings from the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting." UBS, 2025. https://www.ubs.com/global/en/our-firm/art/art-market-research.html
  2. J.P. Morgan Private Bank. "Single-Family Office vs. Multi-Family Office." J.P. Morgan, 2025. https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/nam/en/who-we-serve/family-office/single-family-office-vs-multi-family-office
  3. Deloitte Private and ArtTactic. "Art & Finance Report 2025 (9th Edition)." Deloitte, 2025. https://www.deloitte.com/nl/en/services/deloitte-private/research/art-and-finance-report.html
  4. Bank of America Private Bank. "Managing an Art Collection: How a Family Office Can Help." Bank of America, 2024. https://www.privatebank.bankofamerica.com/articles/art-collection-management.html
  5. UBS. "Global Family Office Report 2025." UBS, May 2025. https://www.ubs.com/content/dam/assets/wma/static/documents/ubs-gfo-report.pdf
  6. Deloitte Private and ArtTactic. "Art & Finance Report 2024 (8th Edition)." Deloitte, 2024. https://www.deloitte.com/lu/en/services/consulting-financial/research/art-finance-report.html
  7. Art Basel and UBS. "The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting in 2024." Arts Economics, 2024. https://theartmarket.artbasel.com/download/The-Art-Basel-and-UBS-Survey-of-Global-Collecting-in-2024.pdf
  8. Deloitte Private. "17th Deloitte Private Art & Finance Conference." Deloitte, November 2025. https://www.deloitte.com/lu/en/events/art-finance-conference.html
  9. Art Basel and UBS. "The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2026." Arts Economics, 2026. https://www.artbasel.com/stories/the-art-basel-and-ubs-global-art-market-report-2026