Over the course of Q1 ’24 we’ve been in touch individually with many of you, our members, who choose to insure their watch collections with us to ensure we’re keeping your insurance in tune with changes in the market for luxury watches, especially in the pre-owned market. It’s one of our unique features that your Zing Cover account acts as a collection management tool keeping your insured values in line with prevailing market conditions.
At Zing Cover we use a weighted index to look at the adequacy of our members’ insured values, and we consult with our members’ chosen retailers and platforms to look at what it would likely cost to source replacements for your insured watches, were you to have a claim, in current market conditions. We are not trying to analyse the market or provide predictions, but rather to take a prudent view of the likely cost of us going to market via our network of market participants to source watches we insure. In years such as 2023, when collectors may be sitting on collections due to speculation of bottoming out prices, that means we need to price scarcity as well as general market trends into our assumptions.
Overall, it won’t surprise many of you to know, our weighted indexations were down between 2% and 4% over the year, and consequently Zing Cover’s average watch premiums also fell within this range. Whilst not a material premium saving, it’s part of our approach to keeping our members properly protected whilst ensuring that what you pay for your insurance is kept proportionate to the likely cost to us of settling your claims in prevailing market conditions.
Across all Zing Cover members, 2023 was also a year of relatively static collection management. We had low levels of selling, trading and PartX of insured watches with 98% of collections remaining stable or growing over the year. This growth seems to have been an area of optimism for our members. Across the year, 21% of our members grew the size of their watch collection, perhaps taking advantage of favourable buying conditions. Much of this growth was concentrated in Q4 ’23.
Over the next quarter we’ll be starting to look at early year performance in 2024, so if you haven’t heard from us lately then keep an eye on your inbox as we may be in touch in response to recent market changes. As ever, you can track changes in the values of your insured watches by logging into your Zing Cover account. From the next quarter we’ll also be looking at shifts in retail selling and certified pre-owned prices as these also inform our indexation data.
