The correction is over
The luxury watch secondary market turned a corner in 2025. That is the headline finding of the 2026 Luxury Watch Resale Report released this week by CJ William, a Surfside, Florida dealer in luxury watches and Hermès goods. After roughly two years of decline, resale prices stabilized across the market — and the strongest references posted real gains.
The annual analysis combines public secondary-market indices with the dealer’s own transaction activity, offering a dealer-side view of real demand rather than listing prices alone. Its message is one of cautious normalization: the speculative froth of the early 2020s has drained away, and what remains is a market rewarding the brands and references with the deepest collector bases.
For anyone who watched the correction unfold — when once-untouchable sports watches slid month after month — the report’s tone will feel like a relief. But the details matter more than the headline, because 2025 did not lift all boats equally. It rewarded selectivity, and it rewarded patience.
Patek Philippe on top
Patek Philippe led all major brands in 2025 at about 7.7 percent for the year, according to the report, driven by the Aquanaut and the Nautilus. Those two families — the maison’s steel sports pillars — have carried the secondary-market conversation for a decade, and in 2025 they once again proved why.
The Nautilus, discontinued in its most coveted steel configuration years ago, remains the reference against which all luxury sports watches are measured. The Aquanaut, long the Nautilus’s slightly more accessible sibling, has steadily built its own cult following. Together, they explain why Patek’s aggregate performance outpaced every rival: when the two most liquid references in the brand’s catalog both appreciate, the brand follows.
It is worth noting what the 7.7 percent figure represents. This is not a promise of future returns, and it is not uniform across the catalog — dress references, complicated pieces and less liquid models behave very differently. It is an aggregate measure of brand-level momentum, and it tells a clear story: in a stabilizing market, collectors returned first to the safest names.
Rolex holds steady, Audemars Piguet returns to growth
Rolex, the volume leader of the secondary market, stabilized in 2025 after its own correction. That matters enormously, because Rolex is the market’s center of gravity: when the Daytona, Submariner and GMT-Master II find their floor, confidence returns to the entire ecosystem.
Audemars Piguet, meanwhile, returned to growth. The Royal Oak — in its many steel, gold and Offshore variations — remains one of the three pillars of the luxury sports watch market alongside the Nautilus and the Daytona, and its recovery suggests the correction’s damage was cyclical rather than structural.
Richard Mille also features among the top-tier names the report tracks, continuing to hold and in many cases grow value at the very top of the price pyramid, where ultra-high-net-worth demand barely paused even during the downturn.
The Cartier surprise
The report’s most interesting finding may be its least obvious: select Cartier references outperformed the broader market even as headline hype models cooled. While the spotlight stayed fixed on the Daytona and the Nautilus, Cartier prices quietly climbed.
Cartier’s appeal has always been different from the sports-watch giants. The Santos, the Tank and the brand’s shaped watches trade on design heritage rather than scarcity-driven frenzy, and their buyer base has historically been less speculative. That profile served them well in the correction: fewer flippers meant shallower drawdowns, and steady underlying demand meant a quicker return to growth.
For buyers, the takeaway is practical rather than romantic. Value in 2026 is hiding where the hype is not — in references that collectors actually wear, from a maison whose century-plus of design credibility needs no auction record to prove itself.
What the dealer floor is seeing
Eitan Cohen, founder of CJ William, put it plainly in the report’s release:
“Everyone watches the Daytona and the Nautilus, and they should, because top-tier Patek, Rolex, Audemars Piguet and Richard Mille continue to hold and in many cases grow their value. But the buyers walking into our Surfside showroom in 2026 are asking smarter questions about value, and brands like Cartier are rewarding them.”
Cohen added that the white-dial Daytona — the “Panda” — is currently the single most-requested watch on the firm’s desk, and that steel sports Rolex, the Nautilus and the Aquanaut move fast in South Florida, while Cartier prices have quietly climbed even as demand held steady.
That last observation is the dealer’s equivalent of a market signal: when prices climb without demand spiking, it usually means the buyer base is broadening rather than chasing. It is the healthy kind of appreciation.
How the report was built
CJ William compiled the report from leading public secondary-market indices combined with its own buying and selling activity. That dual sourcing is the report’s real value: indices show what the market asks, but dealer transactions show what the market actually pays — and the gap between the two is where the truth lives.
The full report ranks the top 10 references by value retention over the past year, identifies the brands that recovered fastest after the correction, maps where value is hiding in 2026, and includes a South Florida market cut showing which models move fastest in Miami, Surfside and Bal Harbour.
Regional cuts like that one are increasingly important. The American luxury watch market is not one market but several, and South Florida — with its concentration of collectors, dealers and auction activity — has become one of the country’s most reliable barometers of real demand.
What buyers should take away
Three lessons stand out. First, the era of buying any steel sports watch and watching it appreciate is over; the market now rewards knowledge, and the report’s “where value is hiding” section is effectively a syllabus. Second, brand momentum matters more than model hype: Patek’s 7.7 percent lead was built on depth, not on a single viral reference. Third, the quiet winners — Cartier’s steady climbers — deserve as much attention as the headline acts.
None of this is investment advice, and the report does not pretend otherwise. Watches are luxury goods first and stores of value a distant second; buy the watch you want to wear, and treat any appreciation as a bonus. But for collectors navigating 2026, a stabilized market with clear leaders is a far better place to buy than the chaos of the correction — or the mania that preceded it.
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