Nearly $31 trillion will change hands by 2035, from roughly 1.2 million individuals with a net worth above $5 million – the largest generational transfer of wealth ever recorded. This is the figure at the center of Deloitte’s latest Art & Finance Report, presented at the seventeenth edition of the Deloitte Private Art & Finance Conference in New York. Art and collectibles, conservatively estimated at 5% of that total, correspond to roughly $1 trillion in works set to change ownership over the next decade – nearly $100 billion a year. Bloomberg, which devoted an extensive report to the phenomenon, sums it up in one line: there simply aren’t enough buyers, or museums, to absorb a volume of this scale in so concentrated a span of time.

The more useful figure, however, isn’t the scale of the phenomenon, but its unpreparedness. The same Deloitte report describes the next generation of art heirs as “largely uninformed and unprepared”: 61% of collectors have never discussed their collection with their heirs, and a further 21% have only mentioned it in passing, without ever addressing what inheriting it actually entails.

This gap between those who build a collection and those who inherit it is not, for us, an abstract statistic. It is something we have observed repeatedly, and up close, over the years. We have often stood alongside collectors who had devoted decades – frequently with real sacrifice, not simply financial means – to the patient building of a collection, and who came to us carrying a specific fear: that once passed on to their children, that collection would be dispersed, sold off without discernment, or simply left unattended by heirs who did not share the same sensibility, or did not grasp its real value.

It is a well-founded concern. A work without documented provenance, without a certificate of authenticity, without an up-to-date inventory, risks remaining suspended in a kind of limbo between the family home and a market with no way of reaching it – or, worse, being sold for a fraction of its real value by heirs who lack the tools to assess it. The issue, in our direct experience, is rarely the intrinsic value of the works themselves. It is almost always the absence of work done in time: documentation, appraisal, and a transfer of knowledge between the one who built the collection and the one who will receive it.

Our role, in situations like these, shifts depending on the case. When heirs wish to carry forward the path set by the collector who preceded them, we work to put them in a position to truly understand what they have received – attribution, provenance, condition, the market standing of each work – so that a collection built over a lifetime does not become inert, but continues to be looked after with the same care with which it was formed. When that interest is absent, our work is equally concrete: valuing the collection as a whole, identifying for each piece the right channel and the right moment in the market, so that a lifetime’s work is released at its fullest possible value, rather than dispersed for lack of time or expertise.

The decade ahead will bring this choice to an increasing number of families – a matter that, by its nature, is best addressed before, not after, while the memory and judgment of the one who built the collection can still guide the one who receives it. It is the collections thought through and looked after with this kind of attention, rather than those simply accumulated, that keep their meaning intact as they pass from one hand to the next.