Luxury watch prices diverge as auctions test collector appetites
Retailers see a widening split in the pre-owned market
At its flagship Geneva sale on November 8, Phillips will offer a steel Patek Philippe Reference 1518 that the house last knocked-down in 2016 for the then unprecedented sum of SFr11mn ($13.7mn), making it the first wristwatch to break the eight-figure barrier and the most valuable at auction until the sale of Hollywood star Paul Newman’s Rolex Cosmograph for $17.8mn the following year.
But in the nine years since the last sale of the watch that Phillips describes as a “unicorn” — just four steel-cased Reference 1518s were produced — many areas of the pre-owned market have soared to stratospheric levels before experiencing an equally marked decline that only now appears to be stabilising.
So the question that’s likely to intrigue many collectors during the next two months concerns whether the 82-year-old perpetual calendar chronograph can meet or exceed its record-breaking 2016 price — or whether its anonymous owner will have to come to terms with taking a significant hit.
At Sotheby’s New York in June, a Patek Philippe Reference 2499 (the successor to the 1518) crossed the block for $4.3mn — a sobering 40 per cent drop from the $7.6mn the house sold it for at a Hong Kong auction in 2022.
Although an extreme example of declining values in the blue-chip sector of the market, it is representative of the Covid-induced boom in pre-owned watch sales having entered a steep decline in the spring of 2022 and continuing until the end of last year.
Ross Crane, co-founder of the data and tech-driven pre-owned trading site Subdial, says the rapid rise in prices during 2020 and 2021 encouraged both established and speculative dealers to pay “tomorrow’s prices” for watches simply to be able to secure stock that they knew they could resell quickly.
“That dealer-driven market put off many end users for two years or more, because they didn’t know where values were going and were afraid to buy a watch that, ultimately, they might end up losing a lot of money on,” says Crane. “But the recent return to stability is definitely giving people the confidence to start buying again.”
However, according to WatchCharts (another platform that tracks prices and sales trends) the pre-owned values of dozens of other brands such as IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Blancpain and Panerai are still on the slide — with Audemars Piguet’s market index dropping by 4.9 per cent in a year and Vacheron Constantin’s by 11.3 per cent.
For Aurel Bacs, the independent watch consultant who works in association with Phillips and is overseeing November’s Geneva sale, it is unrealistic to take a blanket view of the pre-owned market in simple “up or down” terms.
“As an industry, I don’t believe we can talk about one pre-owned watch market,” he says. “It would be like two people in a pub talking about the global real estate market and comparing a villa in St Moritz with a skyscraper in Beijing, a mall in Texas and a private island in the Caribbean. They are all completely different, just as watches can be divided into periods, types, designs, complications and so on.”
Bacs’s point about an uneven landscape is echoed in the experience of Paul Altieri, whose California-based pre-owned watch business Bob’s Watches focuses predominantly on Rolex. Operating since 2010, Bob’s Watches maintains an inventory worth $5-10mn and typically turns over $5mn annually.
Contrary to some sectors of the pre-owned market, Altieri says demand for the Rolex pieces in which he specialises has been exceptionally strong of late, partly coinciding with the US imposing a 39 per cent tariff on Swiss imports.
“July is normally slow due to vacations, but this year we were 36 per cent up on 2024 and are around 20 per cent up on sales overall,” says Altieri.
“I thought the tariff situation would take a few weeks to get resolved, but it looks as though it’s going to go on for a while and that could certainly push buyers from the primary to the pre-owned market — Rolex sends about half of its new product to the US and there is now probably $100bn worth of pre-owned inventory in the country.”
Altieri says the fact that tight controls mean authorised Rolex dealers only have a few weeks’ supply and were unable to “bulk-up” their stock as a buffer prior to the tariff kicking in is likely to further increase the already strong demand for pre-owned.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Charlie Walker, founder of UK business The Luxury Watch Company based in North Yorkshire, also specialises in popular Rolex models in “as new” condition with the brand accounting for more than 80 per cent of the firm’s inventory.
“There has been a market correction, but the appetite for Rolex is still very strong and people are happy to pay 10, 15 or even 30 per cent above retail for a pre-owned piece — it’s a no-brainer, because they can get the watch they want immediately without having to develop a relationship with an authorised dealer, often by buying other watches that they don’t really want.”
But, Walker says other major brands are sticking. “Many watches produced by recognised brands such as Breitling, Omega, Jaeger-LeCoultre and so on have always [underperformed] on the secondary market and can still be had at a 20-25 per cent discount from new.”
At the higher end, he cites models such as Vacheron Constantin’s steel, blue dial, “boutique only” Overseas Self-Winding model as having fallen from being sought-after on the pre-owned market to now selling for well under the £24,800 list price — and the once difficult to obtain Audemars Piguet Royal Oak self-winding with slate grey dial — once fetching as much as £65,000 on the grey market — now commanding less than £30,000.
“The appetite is just not there for those and there are a lot available, so we rarely stock them — when it comes to some brands and some models, it really is a buyer’s market.”
