[Leica] Leica Heirlooms? Future Value?

[douglas.sharp at gmx.de (douglas.sharp@gmx.de)]

Interesting question Rick, has "general" interest in buying Leicas and
lenses fallen by a great amount?
Anybody in the trade got any idea how well used gear is selling?

I've noticed, here in Hannover, that the s/h shops are full of used Leicas.
This started about 18 months ago and you can now get more or less everything
that was quite rare a while back, Safari R3 (2 of them each close to 1000
euros with the 50mm), IIIG (4 or 5, very expensive none below 1200euros) R5
and R7 (about a dozen all told)R6 (4) R6.2 bodies are high and quite seldom
found, quite a few SL, SL2, SL2 "50Jahre", hardly any Mots have been seen
for a long time, loads of screw cameras. Very few lenses are on sale, mostly
50s and 35s. Lots of M4-Ps, M6s, M6-TTL, a platinum M6 has been sitting in
one shop for over 2 years. One shop even has a hammerlack LHSA MP (?) for
sale (new).
This is only the overview of three shops in the centre of town(Hannover is a
provincial capital with a population of about half a million)

I think there may be other price factors beside the digital boom :

1) the older (oldest) models are coming on to the market from younger people
who inherited them and don't know what to do with them.
2)People are converting unused Leica equipment into ready cash, I'll even
venture to say that a lot of these people may belong to the masses of
unemployed (Hannover is running at close to 20% at present).
3)I was told of a couple of cases where people financed their new M7 with
part exchange of older stuff but, apparently, this doesn't happen often.
It's quite interesting to note that the re-sale value of R6,R7 and R6.2
is a  lot closer to the original price than is the case with used R8s and 9s
and that M2,M3 and M4s are holding on at a high level, particularly clean
M2s are commanding around 1200 euros, a rise of around 20% compared with
2001.

Prices are now in general relatively low when I compare with the levels 2
years ago, most of the other top brands are now on sale s/h at throw-away
prices, starting at about 25 euros for simple SLRs (eg Yashica,Ricoh)
and only topping the 1000 for rather special items like RTS II and III
Contaxes and high-end Nikons, Canon manual focus SLRs seem to be holding
their own but the bottom has dropped out of the market for early EOS models,
the EOS EF-lenses are very rare s/h.
Minolta, Pentax and Olympus SLRs are rarely to be found, with the Olys
topping the price list.

Watching the prices of digital SLRs I've noticed that there is a lot of
competition and drastic price cutting going on and you can nearly always get
them to knock a further 50 off the asking price.

With such amounts of good, and quite recent (loads of R8s), equipment
flooding the shops I can't really see a price boom happening anywhere over
here, unless the total demise of Leica (perish the thought)automatically
makes some models into rarities.Maybe there will even be a premium on those
Leicas built before the present range, most of these have already had time
to prove that they are reliable (with a couple of exceptions)
Douglas

> 
> On 22/02/2005, at 9:33 AM, V.Roger wrote:
> 
> > Anyway- Leica Film Cameras will still be
> > heirlooms for our kids- vroger
> 
> And isn't this an interesting point.  Will our recent acquisitions of 
> R8s, 9s, M7s and MPs, not to mention lenses, be worth more if Leica 
> goes under?
> 
> Rick.
> 
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