What is RM Sotheby’s Arizona?
The single most expensive car sold during Arizona Car Week is usually not sold in Scottsdale. It crosses the block on the lawn of the Arizona Biltmore, the 1929 textile-block resort at 24th Street and Missouri in Phoenix, where RM Sotheby’s has held a January auction since 1999. The 2027 sale, on January 29, is billed as its 29th consecutive year there.
RM is the blue-chip end of the week. Where Barrett-Jackson runs nine days and nearly 2,000 cars, RM runs one day and under a hundred lots, most of them with reserves, many of them with seven-figure estimates. In 2026, on January 23, it sold 94 lots for $63 million with a 94 percent sell-through and bidders from 23 countries: a 2003 Ferrari Enzo at $9.3 million, a 1995 Ferrari F50 at $8.805 million, a 2015 LaFerrari at $5.48 million, a Porsche Carrera GT at a world-record $3.085 million. RM called it its strongest Arizona result of the decade. The Arizona auction record is also RM’s: a 1937 Mercedes-Benz 540 K Special Roadster at $9.9 million in 2016.
For a visitor based in Scottsdale, the appeal is the preview. The cars sit outdoors and in tents against the Biltmore’s patterned concrete, doors open, specialists on hand, and for most of the sale’s history the preview has been free to walk. Auction-room entry has gone with a catalogue or a bidder registration, which ran up to $300 in 2026. It is eighteen minutes from Old Town by Camelback Road, and it is the calmest hour of January in the Valley’s busiest week.
How to do the Biltmore sale
Preview day is the day. The 2026 preview ran Thursday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with the auction at 11 the next morning. The light on the lawns is best before 11 and after 3, the specialists have time to talk, and you can stand a foot from an F50 without a rope. Sale day is a ballroom of paddles; unless you are bidding or want to watch a stranger spend $9 million, the preview is the better three hours.
Getting there. Camelback Road west from Scottsdale Road, about six miles, to 24th Street; north to Missouri Avenue; the resort entrance is on the right. Valet is the default and nobody objects to a non-guest self-parking. Our Car Week survival note covers the hotel-and-traffic math for the week.
Admission. Check RM’s Arizona page before you go. The preview has been public in recent years; auction entry has required a catalogue or registration, and the bidder fee in 2026 was up to $300, which included the catalogue. RM had not posted 2027 admission details as of October 2026.
Pair it. The Biltmore corner is the Esplanade and Biltmore Fashion Park, so lunch is solved. If you want the full week, the local rhythm is RM’s preview on Thursday, Bonhams at the Westin Kierland on its sale day, Barrett-Jackson on a weekday for the spectacle, and the Arizona Concours on Sunday for the calm.
What first-timers get wrong. They expect Barrett-Jackson’s carnival and find a garden party. There is no midway, no vendor hall, no beer tent; there is a hotel bar. Dress like you are visiting a resort, because you are, and bring a jacket: January mornings on that lawn start in the 40s.
How a Canadian auctioneer ended up at a Phoenix resort
Rob Myers built RM out of a restoration shop in Blenheim, Ontario, and in the 1990s his auction arm went looking for the collectors who were already flying to Scottsdale every January for Barrett-Jackson. Rather than fight for space in north Scottsdale, RM took the Biltmore in 1999: a resort with lawns big enough for two hundred cars, ballrooms for the sale, and the kind of address that made a consignor of a prewar Mercedes comfortable. The siting was a statement. Barrett-Jackson sold volume at WestWorld; RM would sell provenance at the oldest grand hotel in the Valley.
The strategy held. In 2015, by then RM Sotheby’s after a partnership with the art house, it sold a Ferrari 250 LM for $9,625,000, the most expensive car ever auctioned in Arizona. A year later a 1937 Mercedes-Benz 540 K Special Roadster beat it at $9.9 million, and that two-day 2016 sale grossed $62.8 million on 149 cars, the house’s high-water mark until 2026. The lean years followed the market: $22.9 million in 2024, $31.6 million in 2025, each as a single day. Then 2026 brought $63 million from just 94 lots, three Ferrari halo cars on top, which tells you where the money went in a decade: fewer cars, far higher prices, a room that trades in modern supercars as readily as in coachbuilt prewar metal.
Why it matters to Scottsdale anyway
The auction is in Phoenix, but its customers are not. The consignors and bidders who make the Biltmore sale stay in Scottsdale resorts, eat in Old Town, and preview at Kierland and WestWorld the same week. RM’s result is the week’s barometer: when the Biltmore sale posts a record, the trade press declares the market healthy, and Scottsdale’s hotels feel it the following January. The city’s own Car Week umbrella claims the sale without embarrassment, and rightly, because the week only works as a circuit.
It is also the week’s best argument for leaving the city line. Eighteen minutes of Camelback Road buys an hour among the rarest cars in the state, under the Biltmore’s patterned concrete block, free or close to it. In a week that charges for everything, that is the bargain, and it is the one event we would not skip.