First-party data
What Australians actually offer for sale
No figure for the size of the Australian luxury watch market traces back to a primary source, and the ABS Retail Trade release has no watch category at all. We cannot fix that. What we can do is publish what we hold: 1,665 enquiries from people deciding whether to sell a luxury watch, counted, with the method and the limits attached.
Every figure below is a count of enquiries we received. It is not a survey of what Australians own, and it is not a measure of demand. The sections that explain why sit above the tables rather than under them.
- Sample
- 1,665 enquiries
- Period
- 13 Nov 2024 to 20 Aug 2026
- Extracted
- 20 August 2026
- Coverage
- Australia, nationwide
Method
How this data was collected
- What a row is
- One enquiry from one person about selling one watch, submitted through the enquiry form on this site or through one of our Meta lead forms. Nobody was surveyed and nothing was sampled: this is a census of what came in.
- Period
- 13 November 2024 to 20 August 2026, extracted on 20 August 2026. Those are the dates of the first and last enquiry in the cohort, so November 2024 and August 2026 are both partial months. The enquiry table itself starts on 1 November 2024, but every row before 13 November belongs to the imported backfill described below and is not part of this dataset.
- What was excluded, and why
- The enquiry table holds 3,067 records. 1,399 of them are a one-off backfill imported from a previous CRM when we changed systems. Every one of those rows carries a placeholder brand of "General Inquiry" and no condition or documentation answers, because the old system never asked those questions. They would add nothing and would drag every percentage on this page toward zero, so they are excluded. Three further rows are excluded because their brand field holds a test placeholder rather than a brand. That leaves 1,665 enquiries. We should be precise about what that filter catches: it removes the rows that identify themselves as tests in a field we count. A handful of our own test submissions carry a real brand and give themselves away only in the free-text model field, and those are still in the 1,665. There are fewer than ten of them, which is under half a percent of the sample and does not move any figure on this page.
- Why two sample sizes appear
- Brand and condition use all 1,665, because every source records them the same way. Box, papers and year use the 1,367 enquiries that came through the website form only, because it is the only source that asks the two documentation questions separately. The reason is set out in full in the next section.
- Rounding
- Counts are exact. Percentages are calculated from those counts and rounded to one decimal place, so a column may total 99.9% or 100.1%.
Limits
What this data is not
Four things are true of this dataset that would make it misleading if they were not said. They are here, above the tables, because a number is only worth quoting when its limits travel with it.
It is not a measure of demand, and we do not publish monthly volume
We hold a month-by-month count of enquiries and we deliberately publish none of it, in any form. The series records how much advertising we were running and when we changed lead-capture systems. It does not record how many Australians wanted to sell a watch. Every movement in it that we can account for is a decision we made about spending or software, and there is no honest way to separate those from real demand after the fact, so presenting the series as seasonality or as market activity would be false. That rules out more than the raw monthly counts: not the shape of the curve, not a year-on-year comparison, not a single total for 2026, not a chart with the axis taken off.
It is not what Australians own
The brand mix below is a fact about what people bring to us. It reflects the brands we buy, the brands we advertise against and the pages we have built, all of which lean heavily toward Rolex. Read it as the composition of our enquiries, which is what it is, and not as a share of the Australian market.
Condition is what the seller said, before anyone saw the watch
The condition figures are the grade the seller selected on a form, at a point when nobody had examined the watch. They are a useful picture of how owners describe their own watches. They are not an assessment. Our watchmakers grade independently once the watch is in front of them, and the two do not always agree.
The box and papers figures use the website form only
Both fields are stored as true or false and default to false, so a false can mean "no" or "never asked", and two of our lead sources cannot tell those apart. Our Meta lead form asks one combined question about box and papers and writes its single answer into both fields, which is why all 218 of its rows carry identical box and papers values rather than two independent answers. A second automated source never mapped the papers field at all and records papers as absent on all 77 of its rows. Computed across all 1,665 rows, the answer comes out at 51.2% with a box and 52.0% with papers. Those happen to land within about a point of the website-only figures published below, and we mention it because it is the kind of thing a reader will check, but the closeness is a coincidence rather than a confirmation: the wider figures are built from columns that cannot distinguish a "no" from a question never asked, so they would not be interpretable wherever they had landed. The website form asks the two questions separately, so only its 1,367 rows are used.
Table 1
Which brands people offer for sale
All 1,665 enquiries. Rolex is not merely the largest category, it is more than four fifths of everything offered to us, and the next brand down is smaller by a factor of more than fourteen.
| Brand offered | Enquiries | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Rolex | 1,372 | 82.4% |
| Cartier | 94 | 5.6% |
| Audemars Piguet | 57 | 3.4% |
| Patek Philippe | 48 | 2.9% |
| OtherSeller chose the form's "Other" option rather than naming a brand. | 23 | 1.4% |
| Brands we do not buyGrouped rather than named. These were offered to us but fall outside the seven brands we buy, so we do not advertise for them. | 50 | 3.0% |
| All enquiries | 1,665 | 100% |
1,592 of the 1,665 enquiries, 95.6%, are for one of the seven brands we buy. The rest fall outside the seven, and we group them rather than name them because we do not buy or advertise for them. Read against the caveat above: this says our list matches what people bring us, not that these are the brands Australians own.
Table 2
How many sellers still have the box and papers
Website-form enquiries only, n = 1,367, for the reason set out above. It is a question owners ask us constantly, and as far as we know nobody in Australia has published a number for it.
| What the seller still has | Enquiries | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Box and papers | 572 | 41.8% |
| Neither box nor papers | 514 | 37.6% |
| Papers only | 152 | 11.1% |
| Box only | 129 | 9.4% |
| Website-form enquiries | 1,367 | 100% |
Nearly four in ten sellers, 37.6%, have neither the box nor the papers. A full set is the single most common outcome at 41.8%, but it is a minority. Counting either document on its own, 53.0% still have papers and 51.3% still have the box.
By brand, where the sample supports it
| Brand | n | Full set | Has papers | Has neither |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rolex | 1,105 | 43.7% | 55.3% | 35.0% |
| Cartier | 94 | 39.4% | 51.1% | 45.7% |
Only two brands are broken out. The Rolex figure rests on 1,105 enquiries and is solid. The Cartier figure rests on 94 and carries a margin of roughly ten points either way, so treat it as an indication rather than a measurement. We hold 38 Patek Philippe and 40 Audemars Piguet website enquiries, and at those sample sizes the margin is about fifteen points, which is wide enough to invent a pattern that is not there, so no figure is published for them. Richard Mille, Vacheron Constantin and F.P. Journe have single figure or near single figure samples and are not broken out at all.
Table 3
How sellers describe their own watch
All 1,665 enquiries. Fifteen different raw values on the various forms normalise to the five grades below, and four rows carry no grade at all. This is the grade the owner selected, before any inspection.
| Grade the seller selected | Enquiries | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Excellent | 680 | 40.8% |
| Very good | 558 | 33.5% |
| Good | 294 | 17.7% |
| Needs service or repair | 80 | 4.8% |
| Fair | 49 | 2.9% |
| Not stated | 4 | 0.2% |
| All enquiries | 1,665 | 100% |
74.4% describe their watch as excellent or very good, and fewer than one in twenty flags that it needs a service or a repair. The honest reading is that owners are optimistic about their own watches, which is human and not a criticism. It is also why authentication is a physical inspection rather than a form check, and why the grade a watchmaker records is sometimes a step below the one the owner selected.
Table 4
How old the watches are
Website-form enquiries where the seller filled in the optional year field, n = 932. The median year is 2019.
| Year of the watch | Enquiries | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 or newer | 460 | 49.4% |
| 2010 to 2019 | 163 | 17.5% |
| 2000 to 2009 | 106 | 11.4% |
| 1990 to 1999 | 84 | 9.0% |
| 1980 to 1989 | 46 | 4.9% |
| Before 1980 | 73 | 7.8% |
| Enquiries stating a year | 932 | 100% |
Just under half the watches are from 2020 or later, which is more recent than the received wisdom about who sells a luxury watch would suggest. Two qualifications belong with that. The year field is optional, and the people who fill it in are more likely to be holding paperwork and a recent purchase, so the sample leans modern before we count anything. And the pre-1980 tail is small but real: we checked it for a form artefact, such as everyone dragging a slider to its floor, and the years underneath are spread across the decades rather than piled on a single value.
Gaps
What we cannot tell you
These are the questions we are asked that this dataset genuinely cannot answer. We would rather say so than estimate.
Anything by state or city
The state field is empty on every one of the 1,665 rows. It exists in the table and was never populated. There is no Sydney against Melbourne comparison to be made here, and any city split you see attributed to us is not ours.
Anything about lending
Loan enquiries go through a separate application and do not land in this table. We have no publishable statistics on loan sizes, terms or the reasons people borrow, and none appear anywhere on this site.
The most asked-about model
Model is captured as free text and never normalised, so a Submariner arrives spelled a dozen ways. Cleaning it after the fact would involve enough judgement calls that the answer would be partly ours rather than the data's, so we do not publish a model-level figure.
What any of it sold for
These are enquiries, not transactions. Nothing here says what was offered, what was accepted or what a watch resold for, and the enquiry data cannot be used to infer any of that.
Reuse
Citing this page
You are welcome to quote or reproduce these tables, in full or in part, with attribution and a link back to this page. We ask only that the sample size and the date travel with the figure, because without them none of it means much.
Buy Your Watch Pty Ltd, What Australians actually offer for sale: 1,665 luxury watch enquiries, November 2024 to August 2026, 20 August 2026. https://www.buyyourwatch.com.au/watch-market-data-australia
- Who published it
- BUY YOUR WATCH PTY LTD, ACN 670 502 315, ABN 85 670 502 315. Licensed Second-Hand Dealer and Pawnbroker, Licence No. SHD-0017882, issued in Victoria under the Second-Hand Dealers and Pawnbrokers Act 1989 (Vic).
- Who compiled it
- Max Summers, owner of Buy Your Watch.
- Questions about the data
- If you are working on a story or a valuation and want a cut that is not on this page, email contact@buyyourwatch.com.au or call 0426 474 761. If the sample will not support it we will say so rather than run it.
- Updates
- Figures are a snapshot as at 20 August 2026 and do not update themselves. Where a table is refreshed, the extraction date at the top of this page changes with it.
The companion piece, what is actually happening in the Australian luxury watch market, sets out what can and cannot be verified from published sources, including the Swiss export figures that name Australia specifically.
If you are here because you have a watch to sell
The most useful line above is probably the second row of table two. Close to four in ten people who come to us no longer have the box or the papers. Documentation adds value, but it is not required: our watchmakers authenticate from the watch itself.
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