A separate retained advisory service for high-net-worth watch collectors, alongside our three core services (private sourcing, documented authentication, and buyer-seller matchmaking). We act as the collector's agent — never as a dealer — across the full lifecycle of the collection: acquisition, holding, and exit.
A serious watch collection is not a stack of transactions. It is a long-form asset that compounds quietly for the collector who has the relationships, the documentation discipline, and the intelligence to manage it. Most collectors do not have all three. We do this work as our business, on a retained basis that aligns our incentives with the trajectory of your collection. Pricing is on application — every collection is sized differently.
A separate retained service for high-net-worth watch collectors, alongside our three core services. Quarterly portfolio review, sourcing for additions, exit advisory on underperformers, custody of documentation, insurance liaison, and family-office reporting integration. The retainer aligns our incentives with the trajectory of your collection — not the volume of your transactions. Specialism in Richard Mille, F.P. Journe, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Jacob & Co, MB&F, Akrivia, Rexhep Rexhepi, Simon Brette. Pricing on application — every collection is sized differently.
We assess the collection reference by reference — current market valuation against recent comparables, concentration, liquidity profile, condition trajectory, documentation status, and historical significance. The output is a written portfolio statement, not a verbal opinion. This is how the relationship begins, regardless of whether ongoing management follows.
Where is the collection overexposed to a single brand, era, or reference family? Which pieces are underperforming relative to their cost basis? Where are the servicing blind spots, the documentation gaps, the redundant holdings? We name what the collection is missing — and what it should probably stop carrying — before any acquisition or disposal is recommended.
A written plan covering what to keep, what to rotate out, what to target next, and how servicing, insurance, documentation, and long-term care should be handled. The roadmap is the deliverable from the diagnostic phase. Some collectors take it and execute on their own — that's a legitimate outcome, and we say so. Others use it as the basis for an ongoing relationship.
If the collector decides to formalise the relationship, the engagement letter is signed and ongoing portfolio management begins — quarterly review, sourcing, exit advisory, custody of documentation, insurance liaison, and family-office reporting integration. Ongoing fees only begin once the mandate is in place. Pricing is on application; the diagnostic phase is priced and contracted separately, before any ongoing arrangement.
Built the way the strongest art advisors work with important collections: diagnose before prescribe, separate the assessment from the execution, and never start the meter on ongoing work that has not been agreed in writing.
A dealer's interest is the spread on this transaction. The economic engine of a dealing house is volume — pieces in, pieces out, margin captured on each side. The advice you receive from a dealer is structurally biased toward action.
A collector advisor's interest is the trajectory of your collection. The economic engine of an advisor is the retainer — paid for ongoing work that has no transactional component, plus brokerage at lower rates when transactions happen. The advice you receive from an advisor is structurally biased toward the right action, including the action of doing nothing.
This is not a moral claim. It is an incentive claim. Both models exist, both serve their clients in different ways, and both are necessary in the market. Maison Montres operates on the second model because the collectors we work with are not in the business of trading their watches — they are in the business of building, holding, and eventually transferring a collection that took twenty years to assemble. The work that creates value for them is not transactional. It is custodial, intelligence-led, and patient.
01 — Quarterly portfolio review. A documented review of every holding, with current secondary-market valuation, comparable transaction data over the trailing twelve months, condition trajectory, and a recommendation: hold, exit, or service. The review is delivered as a written report to a format that integrates with your family-office reporting (Addepar, Asset Vantage, Black Diamond, or bespoke).
02 — Sourcing for additions. When the collection has a gap — a reference, a configuration, a year — we run a sourcing brief through our private collector network across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. Pieces are presented with photographs, provenance, and a recommended purchase price; the buyer decides; the watch passes our twelve-point authentication before any transaction proceeds.
03 — Exit advisory on underperformers. Some pieces, in retrospect, do not belong in a serious collection. Some references that looked promising at acquisition have flatlined. Some configurations have been superseded. We say so — directly, in writing, in the quarterly review — and broker the exit on your behalf, transparently, to our private network or to the major auction houses, whichever delivers the higher net price.
04 — Custody of the documentation record. Original papers, archive extracts, service records, prior dossiers, macro photography — consolidated in our Geneva atelier under a documented chain of custody. Accessible to you at any time. On any disposal, the documentation transfers with the watch — which materially uplifts resale value compared with a piece sold without its papers.
05 — Insurance liaison. Annual valuation letters in formats accepted by the major specialist insurers (Hiscox, Chubb, AIG Private Client, Privilege Underwriters), with serial-level granularity. Where the collector wants to compare brokers, we provide quotes from three specialist underwriters at no charge.
06 — Market intelligence. Proactive briefings on developments that affect your specific holdings: brand-level allocation changes, secondary-market clearing-price movements, counterfeit advisories, auction results in your reference range, and structural shifts in the independent watchmaker segment. The intelligence is private — written for you, not posted publicly.
07 — Succession and transfer planning. For collectors thinking about generational transfer, sale to a single buyer, or partial liquidation for an estate event, we work with your wealth advisor and counsel to structure the transfer efficiently. The watches are an asset class that requires specialist input; we provide it.
Maison Montres publishes its retainer schedule. The structure has two components: an annual advisory retainer paid at engagement, and a transaction fee on every watch acquired or sold during the engagement period. For an occasional, single-piece need, our three core services (private sourcing, documented authentication, buyer–seller matchmaking) are available on a per-transaction basis without a retainer.
For starter collectors with less than ten significant references and an active acquisition or disposal cadence.
For collectors with more than ten significant references, including allocation-grade independents and complicated work.
For principals and family-office collections of ten and above significant references valued over CHF 1M, museum-grade dispersals, and bespoke commission programmes.
Payment. All major payment methods: bank transfer in CHF, EUR, USD, GBP, AED; corporate and private cards; bitcoin, ether, USDC, and USDT through a regulated digital-asset settlement partner. Crypto settlement is reconciled at the spot rate at the time of settlement, with the rate documented in the transaction record.
No escrow. Direct settlement. Funds are paid directly to Maison Montres or — on consigned pieces — to the seller of record, with the payment held against the buyer's documented inspection period before release. The buyer takes possession of the watch immediately on settlement; the inspection window runs from delivery, with a written refund-on-rejection remedy if the watch fails authentication or does not match the dossier. This is the model used by Phillips Private Sales, A Collected Man, and the Geneva manufactures — direct counterparty rather than third-party escrow.
What is not charged. No charge for valuation, no charge for the engagement letter, no charge for portfolio review preparation, no charge for declined opportunities. The retainer covers continuous advisory; transaction fees are charged only on completed acquisitions and disposals. Brokerage to auction houses (Phillips, Christie's, Sotheby's, Antiquorum) is offered at the same sell-side rate, with the auction house's seller's commission disclosed and reconciled in the settlement.
The threshold for retained advisory. Retained advisory opens at a starter tier for active collectors with fewer than ten significant references and scales by tier — the value of the relationship is genuinely created by ongoing custody, market intelligence, and disciplined exit planning, which deepen as the collection grows. For an occasional, single-piece need, our per-transaction services are typically the right path; we will tell you so directly.
For principals whose financial affairs are managed through a family office, multi-family office, or wealth advisory firm, the most efficient structure is usually a partnership engagement — Maison Montres operates as the specialist watch resource alongside the wealth advisor, with the client relationship anchored at the partner firm rather than directly with us. Engagement letter is between Maison Montres and the partner; the partner remains the principal's primary point of contact. White-label engagement is available where the partner prefers the work to be branded as their own.
The reporting integrates into the partner's broader client reporting rather than sitting alongside it — quarterly valuation in formats compatible with Addepar, Asset Vantage, Black Diamond, or bespoke. Insurance liaison and succession planning are handled in coordination with the wealth advisor and counsel. The economics work because the watch collection is, for a serious household, a meaningful but undermanaged asset class — and the right structure puts a documented specialism alongside the existing advisory relationship rather than replacing any part of it.
If you are advising a household with a significant watch collection, the partnership conversation is the right place to start. How the partnership works →
The financial press treats luxury watches as a curiosity asset class — sometimes a bubble, sometimes a hedge, occasionally a vehicle for narrative. The reality, for the collector who actually owns serious pieces, is more interesting and more nuanced.
A watch is a portable, private, tangible store of value with no income yield. It correlates poorly with equities and bonds — which makes it useful in a wealth portfolio for diversification — but it correlates strongly with discretionary luxury demand and central-bank policy on real interest rates. It has counterparty risk in authentication and provenance, which is solvable through documentation. It has liquidity risk, which is solvable through the right relationships and the right timing. It has a long-tail of significant outliers — Paul Newman Daytonas, early Rexhep Rexhepi pieces, sapphire-cased Royal Oaks — where the realised return over twenty years has materially exceeded the equity benchmark.
A serious watch collection is none of: a hobby kept on the side; a hedge against inflation; a status display; or a portable form of currency. It is one or several of these things at different moments, and managing it well requires understanding which of those frames is operative at which moment. That is the work we do — not because watches are mystical objects, but because they are real assets that respond to identifiable forces, and the discipline of treating them as such delivers a different outcome from treating them as decoration.
For the high-net-worth collector who is already highly passionate about watches, this is not a revelation — it is a confirmation of what they already do, slightly less formally, on their own. Portfolio management is the formalised, retained version of that discipline, with the relationships and the intelligence and the documentation rigour that no individual collector has the time to build alone.
Portfolio management is contracted on a relationship basis, not a click. A short message — what you collect, what you are trying to accomplish, where the collection is now — is the right first step.
An ongoing advisory relationship for high-net-worth watch collectors, structured as a separate retained service alongside our three core services (private sourcing, documented authentication, and buyer-seller matchmaking). We act as the collector's agent — never as a dealer — across the full lifecycle of the collection: acquisition, holding, and exit. The retainer aligns our incentives with the collection's long-term performance.
Pricing is on application — every collection is sized differently, and a published rate-card pretence is not how this work is contracted. The structure is a flat annual retainer scaled to the size and complexity of the collection (never a percentage of AUM), with separate brokerage where transactions occur. The numbers are agreed in writing before any retainer begins. The model is designed so the firm's incentive is to recommend transactions only when the collection benefits — not to drive volume.
Typically appropriate from a starter collection upward, where the size of the collection means ongoing custody and intelligence create more value than they cost. The threshold is judgement, not formula — we discuss the collection in writing before any retainer begins. For an occasional, single-piece need, our three core services (sourcing, authentication, matchmaking) are typically the right path without the ongoing retainer.
Active specialism: Richard Mille, F.P. Journe, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Jacob & Co, MB&F, Akrivia, Rexhep Rexhepi, Simon Brette. Cartier (Tank, Crash, Santos) handled in depth. Rolex, A. Lange & Söhne, Vacheron Constantin available on request — there are houses better placed to lead on those references, and we are direct about that.
Each portfolio is the responsibility of a named principal at Maison Montres, supported by the Geneva atelier (authentication, condition reporting, custody), an independent specialist network, and the firm's market-intelligence research function. The principal is the single point of accountability.
Where the collector has an existing wealth advisor or family office, Maison Montres integrates as the asset specialist for the watch sleeve. We provide quarterly valuation reports in formats compatible with Addepar, Asset Vantage, and Black Diamond, liaise with the existing insurance broker, and coordinate on tax-efficient structuring. We do not sell financial advice; we provide the asset-specific intelligence that allows the existing advisors to do their work better.
Custody of the documentation record — original papers, archive extracts, service records, prior dossiers, photography — is consolidated in our Geneva atelier under a documented chain of custody, accessible at any time. For collectors who prefer to retain physical custody, we maintain a digital mirror in our system. On disposal, the documentation transfers with the watch — materially uplifting resale value.
Reference by reference, not as a single number. For each piece: current secondary-market valuation against recent comparables (Phillips, Christie's, Sotheby's, Antiquorum, private-channel transaction data), condition trajectory across the trailing twelve months, documentation status, and market liquidity for the specific reference and configuration. The output is a written portfolio statement covering total estimated value, concentration analysis, liquidity profile, weak spots, and recommendations. Delivered before any decision about ongoing portfolio management — some collectors take the report and execute on their own. That is a legitimate outcome.
Long-term care is one of the four pillars, alongside acquisition, holding, and exit. Concretely: annual valuation letters in formats accepted by the major specialist insurers (Hiscox, Chubb, AIG Private Client, Privilege Underwriters), with serial-level granularity. Servicing oversight — coordination with the watchmaker for the reference, scheduling and witnessing major services, and documenting the work in the dossier. Storage advisory where required. Where the collector wants to compare insurance brokers, we provide quotes from three specialist underwriters at no charge.
Yes. Annual but terminable by either party with thirty days' written notice and a pro-rated refund of the unused portion. We are not in the business of locking collectors into agreements that no longer serve them.