If you're looking to add a pre-owned Rollie to your wrist, now could be the best time in recent years to buy one.
Prices for popular models on the secondary market from Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Audemars Piguet fell to a three-year low in 2024, Bloomberg reported yesterday. The publication's Subdial Watch Index (done in partnership with the U.K.-based watch trading platform of the same name) follows prices for the 50 most traded timepieces by transaction value, and it showed a drop of almost 6 percent last year, hitting its lowest point since 2021—meaning this is the best time to snag a pre-owned model for your collection.
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Sought-after, pre-owned Rolex prices dropped about 5 percent over the course of 2024. Patek and Audemars saw a 4 percent and about a 7.5 percent decrease, respectively, within the last year, according to data from the index.
Some brands had a less dramatic decline. In 2024, Omega experienced a drop of about 1 percent on the secondary market. Cartier prices, meanwhile, only fell less than half a percentage point last year, according to Subdial. Since January 2023, the French house is the only company whose individual index has recorded any growth , with prices rising about 4 percent over two years in part due to increased collector fanfare over jewelry watches.
2024 marks the third straight year that luxe Swiss timepieces experienced a price decline. The pre-owned watch market ballooned to new heights in 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic but came back to earth in the spring of 2022, thanks to an economic slowdown and high interest rates. Overall, the Bloomberg Subdial Watch Index is down about 13 percent over two years.
And if you want to take advantage of today's secondary market, there are plenty of fantastic pre-owned models from the Crown to buy now, as we reported in September. Be on the lookout for a neo-vintage Submariner, a five-digit GMT-Master II, or an Explorer II, each of which is experiencing price drops—just make sure to do your research before you take the plunge.
Last February, Los Angeles-based dealer Steven Rostovsky predicted that we'd see a shift in the pre-owned landscape from a seller's market to a buyer's market in 2024, and that certainly came true. As for what to expect in 2025 from the rest of the watch world, though, we had some industry experts take their best guess on what's to come in the year ahead. Only time will tell if they're as on the nose as Rostovsky.
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