![]() ![]() “If you hype everything up to that point, everybody starts seeing dollar signs in their minds and tries to get a piece of the pie. ![]() “In early spring, every auction house tried to do a Royal Oak 50th anniversary sale and those always feel like a harbinger of doom,” Mr. Ku, a well-known vintage watch dealer based in Berkeley, Calif., said prices for key steel sport models had fallen 20 to 30 percent since April. Then came the war in Ukraine, soaring inflation, the crypto collapse and the stock market’s recent tumble. ![]() At the start of this year, the most in-demand wristwatches were valued at record highs as collectors and dilettantes flush with crypto currencies, stock market gains and stimulus cash began to treat timepieces as an asset class. There is no question that prices on resale websites such as Chrono24 are in flux. #Ebay watcher on auction series“Auctions - the whole dynamic is made for these somewhat turbulent times,” said Silas Walton, founder of A Collected Man, a London-based pre-owned watch dealer that in April kicked off a series of online auctions featuring a curated selection of rare timepieces. In the process, these newcomers have underscored the appeal of auctions at a time when the market for collectible timepieces - especially steel sport models such as the Patek Philippe Nautilus, the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak and the Rolex Daytona - appears to be cooling. In addition to supercharging demand for all things digital, it gave rise to a handful of online-only watch auction upstarts - like Loupe This, founded in 2021 in Los Angeles - that have challenged conventional wisdom about how much collectors are willing to pay online. Until recently, however, they treated those events as a way to auction more commercial timepieces whose sales made up in volume what they lacked in prestige. Online watch auctions have been around since 2002, when eBay pioneered the format, but it took the established auction houses - including Bonhams, Christie’s, Phillips and Sotheby’s - another 11 years or so to begin holding dedicated digital watch sales. ![]()
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