为什么新劳力士手表还不如二手的值钱？

datatune

The Economics of Used Rolexes

Narrator: Let’s say you wanted to buy a popular Rolex Daytona watch, a new one would cost you $14,800. But if you wanted to buy a used version of this same watch, you might need to pay over $38,000. So why are people spending more money to get a used Rolex?

Jacob Gallagher: If you use your watch primarily for telling time, then we’re not of the same mindset.

Narrator: Here’s why the used watch market is booming, and what Rolex is doing to get in on the action. This is the economics of used Rolexes.

Experts suggest that it takes about a year to make a Rolex, and wait list for new watches can last months to years, and because of that…

Jacob Gallagher: These days, you can’t walk into any Rolex store any Rolex dealer and just get any watch that you want. For the past few years, as demand has increased, Rolex has not been able to keep up with that demand, their production just can’t match the number of people that want a Rolex. If you’ve got 10, $20,000 to burn, you really wanna watch, you’re probably gonna go to the resale market because the watch that you want is gonna be available there, and so the prices on the resale market have then gone up because there’s more people going to that market.

Narrator: 29% of collectors reported paying more than retail price for their most recent pre-owned watch, according to a report from Boston Consulting Group. And 40% said that one of their top reasons was that they were able to avoid long waiting lists in the firsthand market, this has created a boom in the secondary market. Pre-owned watch sales reached 22 billion in 2021. The used sector is actually growing faster than the primary market, and for some people, used watches are worth more than new ones that’s because some rare styles are more desirable, or because Rolex has discontinued certain models and colors.

Jacob Gallagher: An older model Rolex can have a patina, it can have some wear marks, and so those kind of personal details, those kind of personal age marks, those are things that collectors might want. There is also a bragging rights thing where if you have a Rolex from the ’70s or the ’80s, you’re able to say it’s from this era, it’s, you know, 20, 30 years older than I am and that is just kind of cool to collectors in a way.

The market about a decade ago was softer than it is right now. Back then, you could sell a watch and get a return on it, but you could also sell a Rolex and it could have depreciated in value and you could lose money on it. These days, you now will likely make more money off of it if you sell it on the resale market.

Narrator: Much of the success of the used watch market is due to the rise of online watch resale marketplaces over the past decade. The used watch market explosion That’s where people like Paul and Carol come in.

Carol Altieri: Can we hold that.

Paul Altieri: Get over there, buddy.

Narrator: The husband and wife duo run Bob’s Watches, an online marketplace for buying, selling, and trading luxury watches. They say that they currently have one of the largest selections of used Rolex watches in the world.

Paul Altieri: I started out in the watch business because I could see that there was no real safe, transparent, honest place for people to buy and sell pre-owned watches. It’s been an upward trend since 2010, we’ve been growing consistently about 30 to 40% year-over-year. Two years ago, we did $100 million in sales.

Carol Altieri: There’s so much more for us to tap into that we haven’t had the bandwidth to get to because the growth has been so fast and furious.

Narrator: And Paul and Carol love Rolex’s. Sales of used watches online already exceed auction and store sales, and one report predicts they’re going to reach close to 60% of the secondhand luxury market by 2026.

Jacob Gallagher: During the pandemic, the stock market goes crazy. You have the kind of crypto phenomenon, you have meme stocks happening, and people have a lot of extra capital and they’re taking that in many cases and they’re putting it toward assets, luxury goods and in a lot of cases watches.

Narrator: Starting in 2020, used luxury watches sold for 1.5 to three times their retail prices.

Jacob Gallagher: Rolex is a brand that’s really recognizable in it’s designed, it’s, you know, easy to spot on the street. And a lot of people, they’ll see that their friend has a given Rolex, and they think, “I want that too.”

Narrator: But Rolex, the company, only sold new watches, which meant that the brand wasn’t involved with used watch sales, that is until late 2022. Rolex opened a certified pre-owned program for its used watches. Retailers can send used Rolexes that are at least three years old back to the watchmaker. The certified pre-owned program verifies that a watch is an authentic Rolex and works properly, then retailers can sell the watch with an official Rolex certificate.

The program is already active in one retail chain in six different countries. Another chain of official Rolex retailers in the US will enter the program this May. Buying a watch with Rolex certification could be a draw for first time buyers.

Carol Altieri: You’re buying a watch on the internet, it can be a little bit of a daunting experience.

Paul Altieri: Of all the watches on our website today, almost 50% of them already have the original box and papers from Rolex. We’ve offered a CPO program, a certified pre-owned program now for almost five years. The only thing really new about it is that Rolex is certifying and doing the paperwork behind it. So I don’t feel that there’s any increased competition, but I do feel that the market is big enough for everybody to participate.

Jacob Gallagher: Today, people buy Rolexes online the way that they might buy toilet paper, so it’s really not a premium or a specialized experience. There’s still that consumer that wants to have that experience of going into a store, of being waited on, of kind of being shown watches from a glass display case, and making it feel more special because they’re buying something of such a high value.

Narrator: This certified pre-owned program means that Rolex can take a cut out of a market that it previously left untapped, but things might continue to shift for the luxury watch market. Where’s the used watch market headed?

The used watch market is cooling down as sellers eager to make a profit have flooded the market with inventory. Recent data shows the number of Rolex watches available to buy secondhand, roughly doubled from the beginning of 2022 to September of the same year.

Jacob Gallagher: On those really coveted kind of brand name watches, so to speak, the ones that collectors talk about the resale value has gone down a little bit. Resellers, people that watch that market, they do say that the prices have come back down to earth a little bit, but the volume of sales, the amount of sales happening that still remains pretty high, we’re seeing still a large number of transactions in the resale market. Your day-in, day-out Rolex is still retaining a lot of value on the resale market, you can still get a pretty good return for it.

As with any resale market, there is a risk that the Rolex market can fall out at any time. Five years ago, we might not have been talking about how crazy this market is, and five years from now, we might not be talking about how crazy this market is. The market is so large that to a certain extent both things can be true. You know, people that watch this market will say that that’s just actually a reflection of how big the market is now, where it can behave in many different ways just because it is this kind of really large transactional marketplace.