Rolex watch values are down is a crash coming? - here's why I don't think so.
https://www.martinskeet.com/services-for-rolex-buyers-dealers
Back in 1998 a well known vintage watch seller started putting a disclaimer on his website saying that he thought the prices he was charging for Vintage Rolex was too high and that they were over valued.
Back then it was easy to make a profit on the ever rising prices of classic Rolex. In those days I would ring up various family jewellers across the country and see if they had any old Rolex in stock. A quick train trip, a cash buy and I would be back in London the same day to sell the watch I just bought to a dealer for a tidy profit . I didn’t know it then but that window of opportunity was rapidly closing. Very soon the prices offered by the humblest of jeweller meant that I could no longer buy and sell and make a decent profit. I started to believe that the watch seller might just be right. The rapidly expanding internet, and later, books like mine made everyone a Rolex expert and drove the prices upwards. Prices must crash we thought, but they just kept on going up because there was a large new audience with a huge demand for these watches.
If you think about where people’s disposable money is going today - it is on classic cars, vintage wine, and other alternative investments. We all like alternative investments because our once trusted banks ruined our trust in traditional investments. Today we seem to trust objects and particularly ‘Vintage’ objects to provide us with growth. ‘Vintage’ has therefore become a hugely popular and growing lifestyle category - and a large part of understanding ‘vintage’ is about discovering the rarity of things: how many made, how many left, what detail makes this one more desirable than that example. I think of it like an onion skin, we dig deeper and find even more layers to be tasted and enjoyed. That is why we now get excited about Submariners with tiny differences and we give them arcane nicknames: the ‘Bart Simpson, the ‘Maxi’, the ‘Rail’ and ‘Tropical’ dials. In a single reference - the 5513 Submariner - there is now a multitude of options to find and something for everyone at every price point.
We have sliced and diced the vintage Rolex market into dozens of valuable sub categories and created a massive and intricate horological financial market. It is just like the banks who did the same with the sub-prime market. But unlike the banks who crashed by investing in and dividing imaginary assets - the Rolex market is based on real objects of desire - physical, tradeable and rare assets. The great auction houses now have specialist watch departments, there are watch repair shops specialising in only Rolex restorations, dozens of books, specialist horological magazines and even Rolex now offer vintage Rolex watches for sale. Unlike those banks who thought they were indestructible the Rolex market now really is too big to fail. Yes, prices are down now (2025) but prices are depressed across all the vintage markets. What’s trendy now are modern hard to get Rolex watches and this has reduced vintage prices. But, this is not the beginning of a crash - it’s a market adjustment. My advice would be buy in vintage Rolex now and wait for world markets to recover because the Rolex market will too.
https://www.martinskeet.com/rolex-services-for-auctionhouses-insurers