What Drives Leica Crazy Prices?

[Stuart Richardson]

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8 minutes ago, Helge said:

The price for the new M6 did go up by just a couple of 100€ since it had been introduced, so it is difficult what you talk about („…way up…“).

The prices for pretty much all used M cameras go up, because there is an explosion of demand.

Sure, Leica is expensive, but this is even in front of an exploding market still a small number they produce, and it is produced in Germany, and also here almost nobody works for free.😉

I meant that fashion pushed up the used prices of M6 classic and M6 TTL cameras, not the new version Leica put out. I meant that the rise in the used market for old M6's meant that it was smart and easy for Leica to reintroduce it to capitalize on that demand.

[Helge]

That way it makes sense😀

 

[Danner]

On 1/25/2024 at 11:31 PM, ironhorse said:

Adan

try this

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_dkr=1&iconV2Request=true&_blrs=recall_filtering&_ssn=www_leicashop_com&store_cat=0&store_name=leicashopvienna&_oac=1&_nkw=m4

You must be a wizard.

[coleica]

On 1/27/2024 at 3:06 AM, ktmrider2 said:

Believe me, it is a real Rolex.  It has been back to Rolex a couple times in the 43 years since purchase for cleaning.  I wear it daily and is my dive watch.  Although with the invention of dive computers, a dive watch really is not an essential piece of gear any longer.  I have several friends who purchased Rolexes at the same time from the same dealer (we were Marine pilots assigned to an aircraft carrier on a port call in Singapore).  None of them have ever told me their watches were fakes and I know some of them still have the watches.

I am not sure why people on this forum need to make snarky comments. I wonder if the one in the above photo is real.

Correct me if I am wrong, didn't the military px stores offer some heavy discounts on Rolexes back in the day?

[coleica]

Prices for many luxury items are going nutty; not just Leica.  You can buy a brand new Rolex SS Daytona today for about $15k, and sell it  tomorrow "used" for over $30k.  Why?  Because there is over a 5 year wait period to get one (and you thought the Q3 waiting lines were long), and there are people out there willing to pay for it.  And that's if you find a Rolex dealer willing to sell it to you (they are not required to have a waiting list.  In other words, it is no first come, first served). 

[Anbaric]

Leicas have never been cheap, but the prices have risen sharply in the last couple of decades, much more quickly than wages have. It's hard to believe that the 35/2 ASPH was a £900 lens earlier this century, and you could pick up an M6-TTL + 35/2 ASPH kit for £2200. Leica has been repositioned as a luxury brand where part of the attraction (for some people) is its exclusivity. Pretty much the same applies to various watch brands - not many military personnel will be buying a Rolex or an Omega as their everyday service watch these days. The price of the new stuff drags up the price of the secondhand gear, of course, and this is further fuelled by social media influencers who have made things like the original M6 cult objects (justifying the new version), and by Leica's own recent involvement in the used market. The used price of the more popular film bodies and lenses has doubled or tripled in the last few years. Collectors, of course, are a law unto themselves and the prices of some items have shot up to stratospheric levels. Pretty much anything in the rangefinder line that is uncommon in black paint is now selling for big money in this finish, for reasons I can't quite fathom.

Edited January 30, 2024 by Anbaric

[Mr.Prime]

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I always thought it was because in the old days the M cameras were tools for a job. They were priced accordingly. 

Now that there are many other entrants in the market, most of them with better products with deeper pockets the Leica is a specialist product and for many it is a luxury product. Luxury products are priced differently. 

The number of people who can afford to pay for luxury products has increased dramatically since the early days too so there's a lot more money for Leica to soak up. Think about the economic state of China when the M3 was launched - today there are more billionaires in China than anywhere else. Japan became rich in the 80's etc. etc.

[pegelli]

I bought my M2 second hand in the mid 70's for ~600 DM (actually 300 DM + a IIIf they gave me 300 DM for) in Münster, Germany.

I could probably sell it for a lot more today but I will leave that to my heirs, it's too much fun still using it.

It had a complete CLA in 2020 and operates (as far as I'm concerned) as new.

[coleica]

2 hours ago, Al Brown said:

Here are some recent Rolex price increases.
My dateless Sub went from 7650 euros in 2021 to 9550 euros in 2024, so that is a whopping 25% in 3 years.

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Out of curiosity, where are you getting your numbers?  I just visited the Rolex web site and they have the Daytona 126500LN listed for $15,100, which would make it a lower price than you posted (13,922.71 euros).  

[ktmrider2]

Investment hindsight like all hindsight is 20/20.  I should have bought a dozen submariners in 1980 for $320 (the one with the date were $370) and well as a dozen black paint M4's back in 1970 (college did not allow much investment capital).  Humans are NUTS.

[Stuart Richardson]

4 minutes ago, ktmrider2 said:

Investment hindsight like all hindsight is 20/20.  I should have bought a dozen submariners in 1980 for $320 (the one with the date were $370) and well as a dozen black paint M4's back in 1970 (college did not allow much investment capital).  Humans are NUTS.

Honestly, you should have bought real estate in a major city. This is why Boomers are still so rich and most behind are not. They could buy houses for the equivalent of two twigs and a pile of lint. Now it is completely impossible for huge swathes of society. It is no coincidence that Leica is primarily bought by older people...they still have all the money.

[david strachan]

2 hours ago, Stuart Richardson said:

Honestly, you should have bought real estate in a major city. This is why Boomers are still so rich and most behind are not. They could buy houses for the equivalent of two twigs and a pile of lint. Now it is completely impossible for huge swathes of society. It is no coincidence that Leica is primarily bought by older people...they still have all the money.

You should be an economics advisor...or not.

😊 

[Stuart Richardson]

I am just bent out of shape because I read that Jackson Pollack bought a house on the Hamptons for 5000 dollars which was loaned to him by his art dealer. Adjusted for inflation, it was 85000 dollars. I don't think you can buy a house in the Hamptons for 85000 dollars anymore. Anyway, neither here nor there and the Hamptons are a few thousand km from anywhere I would want to live at this point! More people means more competition for resources be it food or beachfront bungalos. But no worries, infinite growth is a totally possible...at least I heard that from an economist at some point...

[ktmrider2]

Infinite growth may be totally possible for an economist but not for a biologist.  Just look at what happens to bacteria in a Petri dish given all the resources they can handle.  There was a book in college in the early 1970's called the POPULATION BOMB.  Its findings were delayed by technology but still valid IMHO.

[Smudgerer]

For any one who can look back 20, 30, 40 years none of this can be any sort of a surprise. In the UK a house I bought in the wilds of the country in 1970 for £3800 sold for +£850,000 in / around 2004, some improvements and good maintenance for sure but it when sold it was basically the same house as I'd left it in 1975. God knows what it would make now.

Rolex. Around the year 2000 I bought a new GMT Master II from a Rolex dealership near to where I was living in the US, it was around $4K at that time, fast forward to last year and the GMT, ( always a daily wearer and I don't "baby" such stuff ), was in need of some TLC. The reserve was less than 10 hrs, the wind had a horrible grating feel to it, the crystal and bevel had been in hard contact with too many other harder objects in it's past 20 years or so and showed that. Now living in the EU I took it into a Rolex dealer to beg for service, ( if you're not dressed well you have to beg in Rolex dealerships, they give the impression of being more used to a "higher" standard of client ), the work estimate was €1100 which noticeably gave me some pause, at which the person in the store offered me €10K for the watch "as is"!.............I had the repair and service done, it took 4 months, ( does that ring any bells? ), and the GMT came back to me like new with a 2 year warranty and an insurance valuation of €18K.

So it's the same with quite a few well designed and made mechanical things, be that watches, cameras, even older cars before on-board computer everything messed those up, and obviously property too. Whatever they are they don't make them like that anymore. Leica prices? Get used to it...........It is what it is.

[Cattoo]

On 1/31/2024 at 12:42 AM, ktmrider2 said:

Infinite growth may be totally possible for an economist but not for a biologist.  Just look at what happens to bacteria in a Petri dish given all the resources they can handle.  There was a book in college in the early 1970's called the POPULATION BOMB.  Its findings were delayed by technology but still valid IMHO.

Sounds like Malthusian claptrap that has everything backward.  Technology is what enabled the so-called population bomb.  Technology is what has lowered the maternal morality rate from ~20/1000 births in the 1800s to ~20/100,000 births today.  It's why we don't have people dying from smallpox and a host of other nearly-eradicated diseases that limited population growth in past centuries.  It's why average life expectancy for American males has risen from 50 in 1725 to 75 today.  Technology is also what's enabled us to squeeze ever more food from the earth to feed more and more people. 

[Anbaric]

On 1/31/2024 at 8:40 AM, Smudgerer said:

So it's the same with quite a few well designed and made mechanical things, be that watches, cameras, even older cars

I'm not sure this is inevitable, though. Watches are a good example. Some brands like Omega and Rolex have taken the same route as Leica - they were never cheap, but they are now luxury items with prices to match. But at the other end of the market you can still buy a mechanical Seiko or a Citizen (or an even cheaper watch from another brand with a Seiko or Miyota movement inside) for very little money - a really extraordinary price/performance ratio. It's a shame (though commercially understandable) that none of the great Japanese names stayed around in the mechanical camera business, and the suppliers of the components they used to use (like those ubiquitous Copal shutters) have moved on to other things. I wish Pentax/Ricoh well with trying to bring this industry back from the brink. Right now, with Leica, it's as if only Rolex had survived the onslaught of quartz timepieces and smartphones and we'd been left with a single high-end supplier that could charge what they liked to anyone who wanted a new mechanical watch (with crazy collector prices for the more exotic models).

[ktmrider2]

So, shall we list things which have had prices go crazy like Leica cameras and Rolexes?  I would add Mont Blanc fountain pens to the list as well as other high end watches.  Leica is the only camera I can think of which would make the list.  

[Helge]

A list is pretty pointless.

The answer is more than simple: prices go up for everything that is still available in a good shape and the demand is way over the supply.

Done 😉

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[willeica]

On 1/26/2024 at 7:22 AM, Al Brown said:

Leica Store VIenna is 100% OWNED BY LEICA and is one of the most expensive second hand dealers out there, next to Leica Store Lisse, scalper A. Goerlitz and some others. The prices are just a reflection of what the market will bare and how much hype there is.

The Leica Store is owned by Leica AG and the staff there also manage Leitz Photographica Auction which is held alternately in Wetzlar and Vienna every year. They would have been involved with selling the 'Barnack' No 105 camera for over 14 million Euros and the Yul Brynner MP Cameras for about 2.8 million Euros (the same person bought both of them). These items are in a rarefied zone and the prices at the top end are usually determined by competition between extremely wealthy buyers. The same applies in varying degrees as you come down the value chain. If you follow auctions on a regular basis you will know when might have to 'bid hard' for a rare or in demand item and you can also determine which items might have 'soft' demand for them. Websites like Collectiblend can give an average of previous auction outcomes, excluding eBay results, but the site also gives links to current eBay sales. However, the prices there are only a general prediction of what might happen in the event of a rare item going on sale at a 'proper auction'. 

The problem which many people have is in believing that there is a 'set price' for any second hand, tradable and 'in demand' item eg. a room full of nodding heads saying that an M6 is worth no more or no less than  X,ooo - choose your currency. The best you can say is that the typical 'market price' is that amount, but that does not mean that you will get that price if you sell that item yourself, nor does it mean that an item may not go for more than that price at auction or that a dealer is not likely to seek a lot more by way of a retail price. Referring to a dealer as a 'scalper' does no good in the long run. What is better is to know that it is a jungle (less refined word for a 'market') out there and that you need to do your research and gird your loins before entering that jungle. You may feel that an auction might get you a higher price, but you have to take associated costs, including seller's premium, into account.

To the OP, we do not give advice on actual values on this site, but we can and do give general advice, as I have done. You, however, sound like a person who likes doing research and you might also enjoy the cut and thrust of negotiations on prices. Keep going that way.

As for why second hand Leica prices can rise quickly, I think I have given enough above to explain why that might happen. 

William