We Trade Luxury Watches – Not Islands
As one of the biggest and oldest South Florida watch buyers and boutiques, we hear our more than our fair share of wacky stories from customers who want to sell and trade luxury watches. We hear all kinds of breakup stories, excuses and background gossip from our often hilarious clientele. We’re talking extremely creative binding legal contracts with Cartier sales associates as witnesses. We’re talking massive lots of diamonds to sell after a divorce (sometimes including those given to the mistress). We’re talking ridiculously lavish custom pieces given as gifts and to enhance the purchaser’s own personal swag. Our favorite, and honestly, most frequent watch replacement clients? Those would be young, good looking professional gents, typically aroud 27 years old, who need to replace a stolen Rolex after a raucous weekend in Vegas. They always have the same mix of remorse/ YOLO-esque non regrets about asking those strange women back to their suites. When you buy watches and jewelry, and deal in the secondhand jewelry market, you’re guaranteed colorful customers.
None are more interesting than our trade-in clients. Sometimes they’ve vastly over-valued their piece (sorry, there is just no way you’re going to get an even trade for your TAG Heuer with Patek Philippe). Other times they insist that their watch is free of aftermarket parts or diamonds when it clearly is not – or worse, when we have to break the news to them that their watch is a fake. But we’ve got to say, never have we seen such an outlandish trade proposal as this dude, who’d like to trade his “private island” for a Ferrari Enzo.
A man on Craigslist would very much like to trade either $1.2 million or a Ferrari with you for his “3 acre surveyed buildable private island” near Port Orange, Florida. As Luxury Insider notes, normally this would be a deal to jump at. That is until you realize this island isn’t all buildable (only about 1.8 acres can actually sustain building). Beyond that, it’s at a 5 foot sea level elevation. That’s one high tide away from flooding, and even if you do build on stilts (which, obviously you’d need to) all it takes is one storm surge or a few more years of global warming until you’ve got yourself a swim-up living room. And the portions of the island that aren’t buildable aren’t really conducive to sporting activities or animals, it’s likely that it’s swamp or mangrove. And while we’re sure that Port Orange is a very lovely place, it just doesn’t have the same cache as owning a private island in, let’s say Belize.
So, while we’ve seen the offers of trading cars for watches before, this is one that we’d still probably pass on. We might be tempted to find a Ferrari to trade for the right kind of watch, but not for this island. But if you’ve got a watch to trade, we’ll be happy to talk shop with you – and please, bring your most interesting back story!