Investing in Luxury Watches

Are incorporeal investments like stocks not your thing? Not looking to get involved with real estate either? There’s plenty of solid investments to choose from. Luxury watches might be the most stylish ones. You get a high-quality item that will possibly go up in value with time passing, plus the added benefit of the prestige and style that comes with wearing one of those luxurious timepieces. Here’s what to look out for if you plan to invest in watches.

Why Not Bet on Virtual Value Alone

Stocks are still the most popular choice for investments. If you keep up with the market and make clever choices, the volatile nature of falling or rising share value can make you profit in no time. But that’s risky. The market can be manipulated, and local or global crises can negatively affect interest rates. Especially during times of recession and stock market crashes, people start to look for alternative ways to invest and ensure their future wealth.

Popular choices are real estate, art pieces, or precious metals like gold bars. Their value is relatively stable, and these items can typically be sold at the same or a higher price whenever needed. But that’s a bit boring, isn’t it? Buying a piece of metal and putting it away till it comes in handy years later. Investing in a luxury watch is the perfect mix of two worlds.

• One: It is made from precious materials and high craftsmanship. The value of its components alone can be enough to be able to re-sell it later.
• Two: High-quality brand watches are collector’s items. That’s why the value of a luxury watch typically increases with time.

What’s the Market Like?

Like most other investments, the value of an item is not entirely decided by its materials or the quality of its build. You must factor in supply and demand at any given time. While it’s good to pick a watch with high-quality materials and production, you might not always get paid its actual worth if there’s simply no demand for the specific watch at that time.

The older a watch, the more likely you are to get a high profit from selling it. Older watches by highly sought-after brands are rare, especially when they still have all their original components. One of the Patek Philippe Nautilus luxury sport watches as seen on Chrono24 UK, specifically the blue dial standard version ref. 5711/1A-010, has an official listing price of 30,620 USD. In early 2020 the marked worth was around 76,000 USD. In 2021, you could sell it for 110,000 USD. That’s a nearly 45% increase in as little as a year.

How to Pick the Right Watch

Manufacturer and the Inside

As with every other collector’s item, it’s incredibly important that the manufacturer is well known, at least in collectors’ cycles. Brand names have prestige and history, and they are a guarantee for high–quality objects. Some of them carry watches with very specific inner workings. Watches with exclusively mechanical mechanisms are typical of higher value later on.

Edition and Limitation

How high the demand for a specific watch is, is explicitly tied to how big the supply was. If a watch comes out as a limited special edition, owning it becomes an exclusivity, and that’s worth a lot of money for many people. Most of these special editions also come with extraordinary designs or features that add to their novelty and therefore their worth.

Features

Some watches come with additional features. Those might be calendars or moon phase indicators. Details with high craftsmanship, like engravings and intricate metalwork, add to a watches’ value.

Certificates

When you buy a luxury watch, you’re spending a large amount of money. Naturally, you should make sure that you’re buying exactly what was promised. High-quality watches come with a certificate to prove their manufacturer. In the best case, you buy the watch with its original packaging, guarantee card, and accessories. You can lose about 50% of a watches’ market value if you’re missing some original parts.

Personal Taste

Don’t count out the personal taste. If you buy a luxury watch, chances are you want to — carefully! —  use it. While it is most important to consider the market and what will be a valuable watch to own in the future, you should also consider picking one you will enjoy owning at the same time.

Conclusion

With the right market insight and expertise, buying luxury watches to sell them years later can be worthwhile. The highest value is tied to watches with no flaws. If you want to invest in watches and make the most out of them, you might have to rely on using them as a decorative piece in your home, where it’s far from harm. Though, the real fun in buying watches with the intention of re-selling them for a profit later comes with being able to use them as an accessory yourself. But you must keep in mind that it might not stay in mint condition that way.