New Rolexes are hard to come by, and secondhand models — if you can find them — are commanding extreme prices, The New York Times reports.
Rob Corder, editor of WatchPro, told the news outlet that demand is “absolutely off the scale.”
“I knew dealers who were saying three years ago that they had never seen demand for Rolex like this, but every year the market gets hotter and hotter,” he said.
Authorized dealers often hold back their supply for top customers, The Times noted. Many models have become scarce, from the Daytona to the Submariner, the Sea-Dweller and “even Sky-Dwellers and steel Datejusts,” said Benjamin Clymer, founder of Hodinkee.
Used Rolex prices are way up on the Hodinkee Shop website. For example, the Explorer II now sells for $13,000, up from about $7,500 a year ago, The Times noted.
Expensive watches became a more popular purchase during the pandemic, absorbing dollars that otherwise have gone toward travel, events and other luxuries, according to the newspaper. Additionally, some see luxury watches as a solid investment during uncertain economic times.
Last year, Rolex issued a statement saying that “the scarcity of our products is not a strategy on our part.”
“Our current production cannot meet the existing demand in an exhaustive way, at least not without reducing the quality of our watches – something we refuse to do as the quality of our products must never be compromised,” the company explained. The watchmaker was responding to a report from Yahoo Finance about its manufacturing shortage.
Read more at The New York Times