12/30/2025
Decoy Magazine publishes an incredible year in review of the leading auctioneers’ decoy sales (e.g., Guyette & Deeter, Copley), covering each auction in meticulous detail (thanks Joe!). But I have been curious about longer trends. Fortunately, the issue includes historical data in tabular form. I created the chart above to depict the annual gross sale data graphically. Takeaways:
📈 Since 1986, the decoy market grown steadily. Avg realized prices have compounded at 5.4% annually, rising from $1,103 to $8,495 in 2025. This growth coincided with significant supply contraction: lots fell from > 6,000 in the late 1980s to ~2,000 in recent years. The finest deeks are staying in private collections, creating real scarcity, even as notable collections have come on-line.
🚀 The post-pandemic era marked a strong resurgence, fueled by the shift to online bidding. Gross sales rose from $13.4M in 2020 to $18.3M in 2025, the second-highest total ever. Avg prices peaked at $8,844 in 2024 before settling at $8,495 this year. The premium segment remains esp strong, with 250–326 lots annually clearing $10K or more.
💪 The market has proven resilient through economic downturns. The dot-com bust triggered a sharp 59% drop in gross sales, yet averages held firm and rebounded quickly by 2003. The 2008 crisis was tougher, with sales falling ~60% and taking a decade to recover. In contrast, COVID brought only a modest dip, followed by the dataset’s strongest surge (+33% in 2021).
⚖️ Comparatively, decoys have delivered solid nominal returns (~5.4%), outperforming U.S. inflation (~3%) and residential real estate (~4.5%), while tracking closely with gold (5–6%) and high-end fine art (5–8%). They lag equities (S&P 500 ~10–11%), but come with higher volatility (58% std dev vs. ~16% for stocks), typical of a niche market.
My outlook: ongoing supply constraints + ever-more-curated auctions should press prices up. Extrapolating current trends, avg prices could reach $12,000–$15,000 within five years, with annual gross sales potentially topping $20M by 2030.
To me, the decoy market is now all about scarcity and provenance rather than volume.
