Rolex announced today: “Rolex is starting to get into resell market”. Not sure why but there’s people thinking that it will just kill off the grey market. That is the furthest thing from the truth. Let us explain our thoughts on the second hand Rolex market.
The Rolex Certified Pre-Owned program is ONLY a spin for them to get more service work on their watches. Rolex themselves do not set the prices, select the inventory, or sell the inventory direct. Inventory will be sold direct from the authorized Rolex dealers, who take watches in on trades or buying them off clients like all you guys do. All this will do is get Rolex ADs (authorized dealers) to start playing in our world so they have more opportunities for sales. We are sure there will be the big name Rolex official dealers charging an absolute arm and a leg for preowned pieces and the small resellers in small markets having to retail pieces at wholesale just to get them moved.
Rolex CPO program is just them servicing the watch and putting it into a different presentation with a hang tag. You can get the same warranty and features/benefits by sending in a watch yourself you just won’t get the CPO hang tag.
Also for some reason the articles are pushing “everything authentic” and “authenticated by Rolex”. That’s nothing new. Send in your watch to a Rolex service center and it’ll be authenticated because if it’s not all original they’ll give you a quote to replace the aftermarket parts or send it back if it’s all fake.
Really the only downside to this is for the end users trying to establish relationships with their authorize dealers. This model is going to the ways of how Porsche dealerships do it where it requires a purchase of something in current inventory that’s over Msrp + a trade, to get on list for something at Msrp. I’m warning you now, if you buy something overpriced when this program gets going and you try dumping it here at “cost” you’re going to have a bad time.
The Rolex authorized resellers have looked down the the grey market for a long time but finally realized you can’t beat it, and like the saying goes, “if you can’t beat them, join them”.
