Built by people who have spent their lives around collections.
There is always more to gain from what you already own: more value, more protection, more to enjoy and pass on.
Most collections are worth more than their owners can prove.
Every collection is doing several things at once. It holds financial value, and it carries cultural weight, and it means something to the person who built it. Those are three different kinds of worth, and almost none of it is written down anywhere.
Write it down and keep it current, and the whole thing opens up. You insure on this year's numbers instead of a number from five years ago. You sell when the market has actually come to a piece, and you know that it has. You give the work that makes the largest gift. You borrow against what you own. You hand the next generation a collection they understand rather than a project they have to solve.
And you enjoy it more, which is the part nobody puts in a brochure. Knowing where a piece came from, what it meant at the time, why it belongs beside the one next to it: that is the pleasure of collecting, and it deserves to outlive the memory of one person.
This is as true for a university holding thirteen hundred works as it is for forty pieces in a family house. Cove was built to make all of it available, continuously, to the people who own these collections and the people who advise them.
A practice, not a platform.
Software companies ship features and let you sort out the rest. Cove works the way a good advisory practice works: people who know your collection, doing the work on your behalf, backed by technology that never sleeps.
That is why every Cove client has a person to call, and why the record is built for them rather than by them.
People and technology, each doing what only it can do.
Software cannot walk into a house and measure a canvas, and it cannot sign a number an insurer will accept. People cannot follow ten thousand auction results a week. Cove is built so that neither has to.
Cataloguing.
Our experts come to you. Every object photographed, measured, and documented in place, every invoice and certificate scanned, handwritten records transcribed, and existing data migrated out of whatever spreadsheet or system it lives in now.
Built for a house of forty works or a university holding thirteen hundred.
Appraisal.
Cove's network of credentialed appraisers, whose work meets USPAP and satisfies insurers, the IRS, lenders, and the courts. Capacity is a bench rather than one desk, so a signature never waits on one person's calendar.
A value is not certified until an appraiser signs it.
Research and monitoring.
Cove's own technology follows auction results, private sales, gallery representation, museum shows, and press for every object under our care, and surfaces the ones that moved enough to matter. This is the part that was not possible until recently.
Judgment.
Nothing reaches your record unreviewed. Our people decide what the research actually means for your specific piece, hold estimates to a range rather than a false decimal, and label every one of them as an estimate.
The technology finds it. A person decides what it is worth saying.
In practice.
Thirteen collections, watched.
Private collections under continuous monitoring, from postwar painting to photography to wine, every value current as of this week.
A 1,300-piece university collection.
Intake in progress: photographed, researched, and catalogued to the standard the registrar and the auditor expect.
What we will and will not say about a number.
The whole service rests on values being trustworthy. So we are careful, publicly, about what each kind of number is.
Labeled as estimates, always.
- Produced by continuous research, with the comparable sales attached
- Shown as a range, never a false precision
- Never presented as an appraisal, and never sent to an insurer as one
Signed by a professional.
- Prepared by an appraiser whose work meets USPAP
- Qualified for IRS requirements, insurance scheduling, estates, and lending
- Authentication is a separate discipline, and Cove does not claim it
Start a conversation.
Tell us a little about the collection. Someone who knows this work will call you, not a form reply.
Thank you.
A member of the Cove team will be in touch shortly.