$100 Million for RM Sotheby’s in Monaco

100,000,000 dollars. I write it out in numerals to give due weight to a figure that, just six months ago, even the experts at the auction houses would not have dared put forward in Europe. True, RM Sotheby’s has had a very positive run of late, between Switzerland and Paris — but it was Monaco, the only city in the world whose name is bound both to a round of the World Rally Championship and to the Formula 1 Grand Prix, that took the company across this symbolic threshold.
This year’s RM Sotheby’s sale gave the measure of just how steeply the run of successes is accelerating. In 2024, at the same venue and on the same occasion, they had offered 103 cars over two days — of which nearly half (47) were without reserve. The sell-through rate stood at 79.6%, with total sales of around 50 million dollars (a little over 39 million euros), making it at the time the most important auction ever held in Monaco.
Twenty-four months on, and this year, with barely more than half the number of cars offered (56) — and despite the share of no-reserve lots falling from 45% to 29% (from 47 down to 16) — the sell-through rate climbed to 85.71%.