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When Rolex introduced its certified pre-owned program in late 2022, industry watchers disagreed on how it would fare. Some championed the brand’s decision to embrace the category, and expected other brands to soon follow suit, while others speculated that Rolex and its retail partners could struggle as a result of intense price competition in the secondary market.
Nearly four years later, the verdict is in: The Rolex Certified Pre-Owned (RCPO) program has been an astounding success. Just look to the latest EveryWatch Secondary Market Report, which clocked 101% growth in RCPO sales—now totaling $385 million—for the first half of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025.
Last week, Robb Report got a glimpse of the program in action at the 1916 Company’s showroom in Manhattan Beach, Calif., where the multi-brand retailer and authorized Rolex dealer hosted the latest edition of its Coast to Coast Roadshow, a traveling showcase of more than 300 RCPO watches that will soon head to 1916 stores in Baltimore (Nov. 5-7) and Philadelphia (Nov. 19-21).
John Shmerler, CEO of the 1916 Company, spoke to Robb Report a few days after the Manhattan Beach event about the company’s experience with RCPO since introducing it in late 2023.
“Three years later, the consumer acceptance of the RCPO program is growing at a pretty fast rate,” Shmerler says. “They’re getting it. Where we see the most activity is in older pieces out of production, things that are not attainable anymore because they’re not in the current catalog.”
That helps explain the vast selection of RCPO watches at the roadshow event featuring blinding amounts of gemstones, esoteric stone dials and paperwork validating that they were restored exclusively in Geneva at the brand’s Restoration Atelier. Personally speaking, I have never seen so many extraordinary Rolexes in one place. Between a 1992 yellow gold Day-Date 36 with a red enamel sector dial fully flooded with diamonds ($128,950), a 1942 Rolex Atelier chronograph with a black dial ($129,950), and a yellow gold 1998 Daytona with a Zenith movement and a (large) diamond pavé dial with emerald hour markers ($350,000), the selection seemed to trend toward flashy, one-of-a-kind models.
But Shmerler emphasized that RCPO demand is largely focused on sought-after Professional models that are no longer in production—think GMTs, Daytonas and Submariners. “A lot of people like birth year watches, so they challenge us: ‘Find me a Submariner from 1987,’” Shmerler says. “And so we do a lot of that work. We enjoy working with pieces that have gone through the Atelier to be repaired—historic pieces that are really neat, like a 6263 or a 6265 that have been fully restored by the Atelier and then RCPO’d on top of it. So now you take a collector that was in the marketplace looking for, say, a 6263. In the past, they would have been dealing with all kinds of different people looking at various versions of these, not knowing the status of the movement. They would not know anything about the watch. With our CPO, they’re able to buy that watch with full confidence that everything about it has passed Rolex and that Rolex blessed it. And they get a warranty.”
Despite all the bells and whistles, many seasoned collectors tend to avoid RCPO watches largely because they carry a premium compared with non-certified Rolex models in the secondary market. The premium, which accounts for extra costs such as servicing the watch as well as providing a warranty and guarantee, ranges, according to WatchCharts, from about 12.6 percent at the 1916 Company to 31.9 percent at Watches of Switzerland U.S. But even among watch collecting veterans, RCPO is appreciated for the access it provides to models that are all but impossible to find elsewhere.
Jarrod Cooper, founder of the Neighborhood Watch Club in Los Angeles, brought about 20 members to the Manhattan Beach event (“The waitlist was endless,” he says). While he wasn’t in the market for a RCPO watch, he acknowledged that the program “makes sense if you want a cool vintage piece or a sports model that’s not available at retail.”
Shmerler says too many stories about RCPO are focused on buyers who are willing to pay a “big premium over retail to cut the line, so to speak. But that’s not what we experience in our stores or even online. The last time I looked, one of our top five references is the Submariner with the green bezel and green dial. Well, it’s not made anymore. There’s no secret why that’s a heavily sought after watch. People like it, it’s out of production, they don’t make it anymore. So they try to find it in the most trusted possible way and that’s really what we’re seeing.”
The EveryWatch report addresses the phenomenon in a section called “The Pepsi Effect,” referring to the 60 percent increase in year-over-year sales that pre-owned GMT-Master II references featuring the red and blue bezel (a.k.a. the Pepsi) have seen since Rolex discontinued the model earlier this year.
EveryWatch also notes that 75.8 percent of Rolex references trade above retail, making it the brand that holds its value across the most watches—one of many reasons why RCPO is performing so well. To Shmerler, however, the success of the program boils down to the assurances it provides to first-time secondary market customers.
“There were lots of people out there that said, ‘I’m never going to buy a pre-owned watch,’ regardless of what the old construct was and now they have the opportunity to go into a Rolex dealer and buy a watch with the weight of the Rolex program behind it,” Shmerler says. “And that changed the game for them.”
Few would argue that it has done the same for the entire pre-owned market. Yet in the non-certified segment, the dynamics appear to be shifting. Balazs Ferenczi, head of brand engagement at the pre-owned platform Chrono24, says that in the company’s new Rolex Report, Rolex watches account for 30.5 percent of all transactions, but that figure actually represents a decline from the brand’s pandemic-era high of 44.1 percent and marks a return to pre-2019 levels. Omega sits a distant second, with 11 percent of all transaction volume, and Patek Philippe an even more distant third, at 5.9 percent.
“The clearest surprise was generational,” Ferenczi tells Robb Report. “The under-30 buyers who drove the boom hardest have pulled back from Rolex the most, from around half their watch spending in 2022 to about a third today. Young buyers have spread out toward Cartier, Patek Philippe and toward classic, dressier watches.”
In general, Ferenczi says, the market has calmed down: “Prices sit about 55 percent above 2019 and have firmed again over the past year. Buyers spread their money across more brands now and lean toward classic pieces like the Datejust rather than the speculative sports models that defined the hype. Rolex is still the clear leader, and the brand others are measured against. The hype is over. Rolex itself is as strong as ever.”