Watches or Property: Which Holds Value Better?

Knight Frank’s Luxury Investment Index, published in The Wealth Report 2026, tracks passion assets from art to whisky. In 2025 watches rose 5.1%, one of only a handful of categories to rise at all. The index as a whole slipped 0.4%. Across the same year Knight Frank’s Prime International Residential Index, covering 100 cities and second-home markets, rose an average of 3.2%, with prices up in 73 of them.

On one year’s numbers, watches won. Change the period and the order changes with it.

The watch market spent 2022 to 2024 unwinding a speculative bubble. WatchCharts data shows the average Rolex resale price peaked at about $17,206 in March 2022. Even after five quarters of recovery, the overall market sat about 29% below that peak in Q3 2026. Anyone who bought at the top is still waiting.

Prime property moved differently through the same years. Knight Frank’s index rose 3.6% in 2024 and 3.2% in 2025, after the pandemic-era surge. Over ten years the luxury index as a whole is up 38.6%, driven by whisky and fine wine rather than watches, for which Knight Frank publishes no ten-year figure.

• Income. A let property pays rent every month. A watch in a safe pays nothing, and costs insurance.
• Leverage. Property can be bought with borrowed money, which multiplies returns on the equity invested. Few lenders will finance a watch, and the ones that do lend conservatively.
• Use. A home is lived in or let; its value is not only on paper.
• Depth. Property markets are deep and priced by professional valuers. A watch is worth what the next buyer will pay on the day.

• Portability. A watch crosses borders on a wrist.
• Privacy. No land registry, no planning file, no annual return.
• Entry price. Serious watches start in the thousands; serious property in the hundreds of thousands.
• Costs. No stamp duty, no service charge, no letting agent. Dealer margins and servicing are the main costs.

The two markets reward the same discipline. In both, location or provenance drives value: the right address, or the right reference with papers. Scarcity sets the price: a finite coastline, or a maker that limits production. Condition matters at resale. And in both, the buyers who do best buy what others will want in ten years, not what is fashionable this season.

Most of the families we advise treat watches as a personal allocation and property as a core one. A few watches, chosen for love and bought well, sit alongside homes in two or three countries that produce income and grow with their markets. The watch is worn to sign the contract. The property is what the contract buys.