The Role of Art & Antique Dealers An Added Value 3.2 Dealer Demographics
An emerging demographic for art and antiques dealers as a group is a tendency towards increasing average age.
The dealers interviewed were a stratified, non-random sample of the dealer population, and due to the nature of the sample selection were biased toward more lasting, successful dealers. However, from this sample and the dealers’ discussions of their colleagues and peers, the age of professional dealers appears to be skewed towards older age groups. Of those interviewed, the average length of time in business to date was around 30 years, and this ranged from 12 years for the youngest dealer (who was in the 35 to 45 year old age group) to 50 years. The majority of dealers interviewed were over 50 years old, and, importantly, most noted that they tended to work with peers in similar or older age groups. Those that were under 50 years old tended to have predominantly older colleagues also.
It is interesting to note that the dealers’ demographic age profile was markedly similar to that of the collectors, according to the results of the collectors’ survey undertaken for this report (discussed in Chapter 6). Like dealers, the average number of years that collectors had been actively engaged in collecting art and antiques was 30 years (and this ranged from two years to 60). Just over 80% of respondents to the buyers’ survey were aged over 45 years, and nearly 60% were over 55 years old.
There is a general trend towards aging in the workforce globally. In the EU for example, the employment rate of older workers has increased from 36.5% in 1999 to 46% in 2009, while the US rate also increased 3% over the same ten year period.4
However, dealers stand in stark
contrast to the typical profile of workers in retail sectors in many countries, where the workforce often has a high proportion of employees under 25, many of whom are part-time and with low qualifications. In the UK retail sector for example, the proportion of employees under 25 years is close of one third of the total.5
dealers (and increasingly their business models) is more matched to the classification of “professional services” which has lower rates of younger employment and often higher education on average. In the US for example less than 10% of professional services workers are less than 25 years old and around 22% are 55 and over, and this is matched quite closely by the UK and other major markets in Europe.6
Although they are classified as retailers, the demography of
4
The employment rate of older workers is calculated by dividing the number of persons aged 55 to 64 in employment by the total population of the same age group. The indicator is based on the EU Labour Force Survey 2010 from Eurostat.
5 Statistics from the UK Department for Work and Pensions (2010), at
www.dwp.gov.uk. 6 Bureau of Labour Statistics (2010), from
www.bls.gov.
20 Historical & Future Perspectives
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