A financial services firm with offices in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco maintained a corporate art collection of approximately 180 works. Their previous appraisal vendor had retired, and the facilities team responsible for the collection, alongside their primary duties, needed to coordinate a full revaluation for insurance compliance.
This is the kind of engagement that looks simple on paper and becomes complex in practice.
The coordination problem
A multi-site revaluation requires finding qualified appraisers in each city, and the right appraiser depends on what’s actually on the walls. Contemporary art in New York, mixed media in Chicago, photography in San Francisco. Each requires category-specific expertise.
Beyond matching, there is the logistics of scheduling site visits around business operations, managing building access and security protocols, ensuring each appraiser follows a consistent methodology, and consolidating reports into a format the insurer will accept.
For a facilities team managing this alongside their core responsibilities, the coordination burden is significant. Every vendor interaction generates emails, phone calls, scheduling conflicts, and follow-up. Multiply that across three cities and three specialists, and the project quickly consumes disproportionate bandwidth.
How we approached it
Title Concierge handled the engagement in three phases.
Specialist matching
We identified category-appropriate appraisers in each city from our vetted network: a contemporary art specialist in New York, a mixed-media specialist in Chicago, and a photography specialist in San Francisco. Each was selected based on credentials, geographic proximity, and availability within the engagement timeline.
Logistics coordination
Title managed scheduling, site access requests, and the secure handling of appraisal documentation across all three locations. The facilities team’s involvement was limited to confirming building access: unlocking doors and providing escort where required by security policy.
We also ensured all three appraisers worked from the same methodological framework and report template. This is a detail that matters: when three different appraisers deliver three different report formats, the consolidation work falls back on the client.
Consolidated reporting
All appraisals were delivered in a standardized format through the Title platform, giving the firm a single, audit-ready document for their insurer. No reconciliation, no reformatting, no back-and-forth.
The results
The revaluation was completed in six weeks, half the time the facilities team had estimated for managing it themselves. The cost came in 45% below the firm’s previous vendor arrangement, driven by competitive sourcing rather than defaulting to a single provider.
More importantly, several works were identified as significantly underinsured. The standardized reporting made this immediately visible, allowing the firm to adjust coverage before their next renewal.
What this illustrates
Multi-site, multi-specialist engagements are where coordination costs compound. Each additional city, each additional asset category, each additional vendor adds a layer of management overhead. For teams that manage collections as a secondary responsibility, this overhead is unsustainable.
The lesson is not that the work is hard. The specialists themselves are excellent at what they do. The lesson is that orchestrating specialists across geographies and timelines is a distinct skill, one that most organizations don’t have in-house and shouldn’t need to build.
What happened next
The firm now uses Title Steward for ongoing collection management and has engaged Title Concierge for their next revaluation cycle. The combination of governance platform and specialist network gives them institutional-grade collection management without building an internal team.
Read the full case study for additional details on the engagement metrics and outcomes.