This.

Same with the major dealers as well, they'll either turn you away or give you a ridiculously low price

 

Oh for sure. Sometimes if you are not in 'the club' that will happen. Especially in art:
https://observer.com/2012/02/harry-potter-and-the-boring-art-fair-story/

 

i'm not in any club and they accepted did a great job selling a 2914-1 railmaster for me. they will not accept watches if they already have something very similar in an auction. . .

 

they also (until this auction i noticed) severely limit the # of pieces they will take with sub 25k estimates. . much more profitable this way per lot since fixed costs are similar for photography etc

 

not 100% of business could be fake. they would need at least 30% legit auctioning

 

Oddly enough, same legitimacy odds as your OF account...

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CB_Q57YlZX6/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

 

Finally a bit of sense.
What a load of poppycock in this thread.

 

+1

what i have been trying to say

by all means.. . i cannot imagine a WORSE way to launder money than giving an auction house all of your financial / bank information (you have to precleared to bid) and have there be a substantial paper trail on a watch that once sold in a public forum can be identified and tracked forever

if there are any actual criminals on OF they are just laughing hysterically at the conjecture on this thread

you can begrudge aurel his success but Occam's razor applies .. is it more likely he has a dedicated following of folks that are not scouring chrono24 for bargains and has cultivated rich crossover buyers from the art world (where the most expensive watch is a drop in the bucket compared to say, a nice Richter)

or that watch prices are somehow inflated ONLY at phillips because people are using an auction house in broad daylight to launder money

 

so the only plausible reason is; that there are actual extremely wealthy people buying modern rolex pieces at 40-50% higher prices than hqmilton.... because ___________________________?

 

If there are any Netflix scriptwriters here on OF who produce a show about watch auctions, some of you guys who've posted here should demand a percentage for all the fertiliser you've fed them.

 

Because they wanted to "win" something and an extra $10K to them is equivalent to a $10 bill to nearly all of the OF community. I think the other interesting angle for the laundering argument is that we're talking about $25K modern Rolex watches that they'll sell for $15K on the grey market once it's been "cleaned." That is laughably low for money laundering purposes if people are trying to compare this to cartel or similar activity...it would take 40 GMTs through Phillips to clean $1M!

Money laundering talk was rampant a few years ago too when Heuers were going through the roof (in particular, a Jochen Rindt Autavia 2446 went for $70K and had people scratching their heads), but the simplest answer is probably the truth...Phillips has a base of extremely wealthy buyers who don't care about resale value and simply want to win a watch.

Now the caveat...I am positive that something shady occurs at nearly every auction (think: watch fund manipulation, pre-arranged stalking horse bidders, brands bidding on their own watches), but the amount of vitriol towards Phillips that I saw on IG yesterday just didn't really merit what I was seeing in the results.

 

Always go for cock up over conspiracy.

Money laundering doesn't make sense as an explanation for consistently high prices, althouth I'm sure it does go on a bit. Auction houses don't accept cash for large purchases. If you've already got your cash into the banking system, buying watches at auction would be one of the most inefficient ways of moving it -- even at $500k, the sums are either too small to interest the big players, or too big for the small players; watches, especially at that level, are relatively illiquid assets; and as someone else mentioned, you leave a paper trail a mile long. If you're buying a Degas for $50m, it's worth going to the considerable cost and trouble of setting up an alternative identity with a bank in Montenegro or somewhere, but not for a watch.

As @tyrantlizardrex suggests, there is probably a a lot of tax evasion going on, but the other factor is that if you're rich and want the status of a big-name watch on your wrist but can't be bothered doing the research, buying from Phillips sounds like a good idea.

 

Precisely.

Why go to Salt Bae and spend $1000 on a steak you can easily get elsewhere for $150?

IMO more to do with affluence or perception than nefarious activity.

On second thought maybe what SB is doing to steak does constitute as a crime.

 

The super rich don’t enjoy looking like suckers or overpaying for what they buy, that attitude is one reason why they were able to accumulate all of that wealth to begin with. So yes, $10,000 doesn’t objectively matter to a person worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. But that same person will not like buying a Pepsi or Batman for $10-$20K over grey market and being called a sucker by his friends. And once he finds out that he overpaid that much he’ll wonder whether he can trust other Phillips prices. Yes, I understand Phillips being able to command a premium when they are able to source rare and unique pieces, but the prices of commodity watches don’t make sense.

 

I understand your logic, but in my experience, they just don’t care. Nor would anyone call them out for paying more than they’d have paid on the grey market. Beyond a certain level of wealth, money is just numbers on a page.

 

At the end of the day, the truth may be a combination of all the variables mentioned. But, as a collector and now not an active buyer, I don’t really care: let the deep pockets keep pumping up the watch market in the midst of a global pandemic. At least something I own is going up in value...

 

I think what OF members don't get is how..literally irrelevant any watch is to a truly super rich person. 25mm and 100m paintings folks... The enitre auction today every single lot was less than 20mm usd

 

I'm off a touch.. Phillips entire sale both days was 30mm

Lets compare this to christies upcoming 24 hr sale which I bet does 10-20x that #

 

A truly super rich person does not care to spend time to bid on a modern steel rolex at Phillips, he just picks up a phone and it will be readily available.