This spring Sotheby’s set the New York art scene abuzz with its purchase of the landmark Breuer building from its previous owner, the Whitney Museum. The auction house plans to move from its current York Avenue headquarters in early 2025, to the iconic building on Madison Avenue in the Upper East Side with updated galleries, exhibition space, and auction room.

Like most auction houses since the pandemic, Sotheby’s has been expanding its physical premises beyond just New York.

In Hong Kong, Sotheby’s is set to move from its current gallery and office at Admiralty’s One Pacific Place to an expanded Asia-Pacific headquarters at Six Pacific Place in 2024. There will also be a brand-new gallery space with a cafe concept nearby at Landmark Chater in Central. After fifty years of conducting sales in the city, these in-house facilities will enable the auction company to run year-round sales for the first time, like their New York and London offices.

The first half of this year saw the launch of Shanghai Sotheby’s Space, adjacent to the Suzhou Creek, serving as both a showroom and exhibition space. The auction house also debuted an online sales platform Buy Now in mainland China that allowed buyers to make purchases 24/7.

As for Asia’s most hyped art capital, last year saw the appointment of Jane Yoon, who previously managed Phillips office in Seoul, as Sotheby’s Managing Director for their new office in the city. Also, Singapore saw its first Sotheby’s sale in fifteen years last August.

Back in the US, Sotheby’s will be launching Gantry Point, a 240,000 square-foot building with state-of-the-art facilities in Long Island City. Closer to home, there is a new flagship salesroom slated for Paris in 2024.

But none of this quite compares to the auction house’s appetite for expansion into markets beyond fine art, adopting an approach that can largely be described as trying everything but the kitchen sink. During the summer of 2019, Sotheby’s announced its first-of-a-kind online sneaker auction, featuring famous footwear such as Nike’s “Moon Shoe” which sold for $437,500. The pandemic-induced lockdowns of the following year only spurred the auction house’s foray into the luxury market, with online bidding becoming all the rage amongst the bored and wealthy.

Just this month, Sotheby’s made headlines for auctioned a 55.22 carat unmounted ruby for $34.8 million in New York, proving the luxury market holds lucrative gains, at least with high-value sales items.

Let’s not forget digital art, or more specifically, NFTs. While Christie’s may have made headlines for its record-breaking live online auction sale of Everydays: The First 5000 Days (2021) by Beeple at $69 million on 11 March 2021, Sotheby’s went a slightly different route.

Sotheby’s began to hold marquee sales, dubbed Natively Digital, three times a year, featuring a specially curated selection of NFTs from the most established creators of the digital art scene. In October that same year, the international auction house even launched Sotheby’s Metaverse.

More recently, Sotheby’s held a live sale of 37 NFTs that used to be the property of a recently bankrupt Singapore-based crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital on 15 June in New York. The auction house is promoted it as their largest ever live sale of digital art, with sales totalling $11 million, well above estimates.

However, the auction house has also reportedly been downsizing its NFT operations since April.

Nonetheless, Sotheby’s certainly seems to have come a long way since its on-again-off-again partnership with eBay as well as significantly fluctuating sales. The marked shift in can be attributed to Patrick Drahi, the French-Israeli billionaire, taking the auction house private in June 2019 in a surprise $3.7 billion deal, as well as the immediate appointment of his long-time ally Charles F. Stewart as CEO.

Since 2021, there have been multiple reports about the auction house possibly going public again, thanks to its strong returns these few years. While the impact of the recession could impede such a move, it does seem that for now the 279-year-old auction business has bought itself at least few good years – as long as it does not spread itself thin across to many locations and markets.

A version of this analysis was originally commissioned by London-based Pictorum Advisory for their June newsletter.