New Rolexes are hard to come by and pre-owned models – if you can find them – sell for extreme prices, The New York Times reports.

WatchPro editor Rob Corder told the outlet that the request was “absolutely off the scale”.

“I knew dealers who said three years ago that they had never seen such demand for Rolex, but every year the market gets hotter and hotter,” he said.

Authorized dealers often withhold their supply for the best customers, The temperature Noted. Many models have become scary, from the Daytona to the Submariner, the Sea-Dweller and “even steel Sky-Dwellers and Datejusts,” said Benjamin Clymer, founder of Hodinkee.

Used Rolex prices are on the rise on the Hodinkee Shop website. For example, the Explorer II now sells for $13,000, up from around $7,500 a year ago, The temperature Noted.

Expensive watches have become a more popular purchase during the pandemic, absorbing dollars that would otherwise have been spent on travel, events and other luxuries, according to the newspaper. Additionally, some view luxury watches as a solid investment in times of economic uncertainty.

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Last year, Rolex issued a statement saying that “the scarcity of our products is not a strategy on our part”.

“Our current production cannot comprehensively meet existing demand, at least not without reducing the quality of our watches – which we refuse to do because the quality of our products must never be compromised,” the company explained. . The watchmaker was responding to a report from Yahoo finance on its manufacturing shortage.

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