Vintage Watches Are Being Sold as an Asset Class in Indonesia. Here's What the Resale Data Actually Shows
6 min read
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6 min read
A vintage watch ad rarely says "buy this because you like it." It says this is a vintage watch investment: a piece that will hold its value, or grow it, the way a stock or a bond does. The growth numbers behind that pitch are real. What almost never gets shown next to them is what happens the day you actually try to turn the watch back into cash. That gap, between the marketing and the resale data, is what this article covers.
In the pre-owned watch trade, dealers generally split watches into three bands: vintage (made before 1990), neo-vintage (1990 to 2004), and modern (2005 onward), a split several specialist watch outlets use when discussing the pre-owned market's recent growth. The vintage label carries weight because it implies scarcity: a discontinued reference, a design detail no longer made, a story attached to a specific decade. That story is exactly what gets sold as "investment grade."
Deloitte's own December 2024 report, "Swiss Watch Industry Insights 2024: Spotlight on the Pre-Owned Market," found that neo-vintage watch sales rose 123% since 2023, outpacing modern watches, and that a fifth of surveyed consumers planned to buy a second-hand watch in 2024, roughly double the share who said the same in 2020. Deloitte's own separate projection has the pre-owned watch market growing to be as large as the market for new watches within about a decade. Some independent industry analysts go further still, with one estimate (LuxeConsult, reported by Bloomberg) putting the pre-owned market at roughly $85 billion by 2033. That figure has not been reconciled against Deloitte's own, more conservative growth path, so treat it as one bullish outside estimate, not a settled number.
Growth in sales volume is not the same as growth in price. Deloitte's own pricing data shows the broader pre-owned watch market peaked in March 2022, then fell 16.4% over the following two years before stabilising through 2024. Separately, WatchCharts' own Overall Market Index, which tracks resale prices across the pre-owned market, rose 4.9% for full-year 2025, a recovery after declines in both 2023 and 2024, retrieved 2026-08-22. A handful of specific references, mostly from Rolex, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet, drive most of that gain. Most watches on the market, vintage included, still trade below their original retail price, not above it.
A modern watch bought new comes with a receipt, a warranty card and, increasingly, a digital certificate. A vintage piece bought decades after it left the factory usually has none of that, and the authentication risk this creates is the biggest practical difference between a vintage watch and almost any other asset a NetWort user tracks.
Two professional buyers have published exactly how often this shows up. Bezel's own 2024 Watch Market Insights report, covering roughly $700 million worth of submitted listings, found it rejected 29% of the watches sellers tried to list in 2024, up from 23% in 2023, with Rolex (37% of rejections) and Tag Heuer (34%) the most frequently faked. Watchfinder's CEO, Arjen van de Vall, told Bloomberg in July 2023 that as many as 10% of the watches the company received from sellers turned out to be fakes, and that only about 20% of today's best counterfeits can still be spotted on sight, down from roughly 80% a few years earlier.
For an Indonesian owner, there are two real channels, and they work very differently.
IDWX (Indonesia Watch Exchange), a Jakarta-based marketplace, runs a titip jual (consignment) service with a commission of just 2% of the final sale price: a watch that sells for Rp100,000,000 nets the owner Rp98,000,000. IDWX's own published figures put the average time to sell at one to two weeks, sometimes faster, through its buyer network, according to the platform's own service pages. That is a genuine sale, at close to full market price, once a buyer is actually found.
Lesca Gadai Premier, a private pawn broker distinct from state-owned Pegadaian, takes a different route: a secured loan rather than a sale. Its own published terms offer up to 95% of a watch's appraised value as a loan, conditional on the watch's box, papers and condition, at interest from 2% per month, with no penalty for early repayment. It accepts roughly 29 luxury brands and insures each watch it holds. This gets cash fast without giving up ownership, but it is a loan against the watch, not a sale of it, and the appraisal itself depends on exactly the kind of authentication scrutiny described above.
The honest answer is that it depends entirely on which watch, in what condition, with what paperwork, sold through which channel, and none of that is knowable from a marketing headline about neo-vintage sales being up 123%. The sales-growth and market-size numbers in that pitch are real. So are the price declines, the rejection rates and the loan-versus-sale distinction above. A vintage watch can be a genuine collectible. Whether it behaves like a reliable financial asset is a separate question this data does not answer with a simple yes.
If a vintage watch is sitting in your portfolio as a manual asset, log it honestly rather than at its optimistic asking price. On NetWort's Holdings page, the Luxury Goods category's Collectible sub-category, which names a Rolex as its own example, defaults to a +5% annual rate, while the Standard sub-category defaults to -15%. A documented, authenticated, actively-traded reference can reasonably sit in Collectible; a piece with uncertain papers or an unclear authentication history is more honestly logged under Standard until that is resolved.
The same gap between a quoted value and real cash shows up across other physical assets. Our breakdown of collectibles and liquidity risk covers the dealer spreads and auction fees on watches and other collectibles more broadly, and our look at diamond resale value versus retail price walks through the same retail-markup problem on a different physical asset.