Cartier’s Reign, Small Watches, and Lots of Cognitive Dissonance: Inside the Current State of the Pre-Owned Watch Market
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As 2025 came into full swing, stories with, more or less, the same headline flooded the web: "Rolex Prices at Four-year Low on Secondhand Market," WWD proclaimed. "Rolex, Patek Used Watch Prices Fell to Three-Year Low in 2024," Bloomberg said.
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The stories all cited a new Q4 watch market report from Morgan Stanley and WatchCharts that indicated pre-owned watch prices fell 1.5 percent in the fourth quarter, continuing a downward trend that began after the market peaked in May 2022. The report coincided with another report from Deloitte released on Jan. 16, this one also focused on the pre-owned watch market. To round out the flurry of pre-owned news, the online dealer Watchfinder & Co. offered a set of predictions for the secondary market in 2025 (in short: "a transformative year marked by a strategic shift toward value proposition and consumer choice, even among prestigious brands").
Below, we tease out a few nuances lurking beneath the attention-grabbing headlines.
Cartier Is Queen to Rolex's King
There is no question that Cartier has outperformed the market over the past two and a half years. According to Morgan Stanley and WatchCharts, the brand, which saw a fourth quarter decline of -2.5 percent, performed better than all of the other brands the analysts tracked with an average secondary market price over $3,000. "It is also the only brand at this price point to see a positive performance over the past two years (+0.7 percent)," said the report. And Deloitte, citing data from Chrono24, noted that Cartier's market share for sales of neo-vintage timepieces, which Chrono24 defines as watches produced from 1980 to 2004, has more than tripled since 2018.
"It seems like Cartier keeps rocking the market," Andrea Parmegiani of the Monaco Legend Group tells Robb Report , citing the brand's 1970s and '80s design watches as well Tanks from the '50s and '60s as hot tickets.
But don't count out the Crown just yet. " Rolex is still the juggernaut," says Eric Wind, owner of Wind Vintage in Palm Beach, Fla. "Most people, if they're buying their first watch or their 100th, Rolex is primarily what they're seeking. It's still King Kong."
Condition, Condition, Condition
The difference in value between vintage watches in average condition and those in excellent condition appears to be growing, according to dealers.
"The market gets continually smarter on this issue," Wind says. "It is the biggest trend across vintage but also modern. There's a lot more awareness."
Wind explained that while dials and hands in modern watches are typically in great condition, cases and bracelets may suffer from over-polishing. "If you compare an unpolished modern or vintage watch with one that's been polished, you'll see the difference," he says. "The coronet on the crown might be polished away, or not be as crisp and attractive. If someone bought a modern pre-owned watch, they might not care. Once you see the better version, it's like eating store-bought raman noodles vs. Momofuku."
The Monaco Legend Group's Parmegiani offered a simple explanation for the newfound emphasis on truly unpolished watches: "What's driving this shift is the understanding that condition really makes the difference in rarity and therefore possible revaluation," he says.
#TeamSmall Reigns
If there was ever any doubt about the longevity of the small-case trend, it's safe to say that smaller wristwatches—even teeny-tiny 26 mm styles —are here to stay. "Size is no longer an issue," Tania Edwards of Collectability, the vintage Patek Philippe specialist, says.
She experienced the trend first-hand at the recent Original Miami Beach Antique Show , where she saw male clients actively hunting for smaller watches. "I heard the description 'elegant' more times than ever before, giving me hope that the days of steel sport watches may be coming to an end," she says.
Cognitive Dissonance
Don't be surprised if you're struggling to reconcile the gloomy pre-owned news with what you see on social media, or with reports of strong dealer-to-dealer sales at shows like the one in Miami. There are a lot of contradictory signals coming from the marketplace.
Take, for example, the news, according to Morgan Stanley and WatchCharts, that Richemont was the biggest underperformer among the four Swiss groups it tracks, with prices falling almost 8 percent year over year, and that Vacheron Constantin led the losing pack with a decline of -11.7 percent. The report went on to put Vacheron's decline in context: The brand saw an "astronomical rise between 2020 and 2022 as demand for high-end sports models soared and consumers sought alternatives to the unobtainable Audemars Piguet Royal Oak and Patek Philippe Nautilus," said the report, which also namechecked Piaget (-10.0 percent), IWC (-9.1 percent), Panerai (-7.8 percent), and A. Lange & Sohne (-6.8 percent) as underperformers.
All of which might sound confusing to anyone who's been following both Piaget , arguably the buzziest brand of 2024, thanks to renewed interest in its chic, stone dial watches from the 1970s, or Vacheron, which on Jan. 13 released its new Historiques 222 timepiece in stainless steel to great fanfare. (Here's a sampling of online praise for the new model, from none other than watch expert Nick Foulkes : "The 222 is probably more popular now than it was back in the late '70s—there is a Time Machine-like quality about the incredible attention to detail but it also transcends its period feel to be about more than just nostalgia," he wrote on Instagram. "It is a properly revived archive piece that has reintegrated itself into the story of the brand.")
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