For the last 30 days I've been running an hourly scrape of the Patek Philippe 5711/1A-010 across 13 dealer marketplaces. Same reference, same condition class (full-set 2020-2022), no aftermarket modifications. This article is the cross-platform median data — what I found, why it holds, and how I'd think about sourcing if I were trading the gap.
The headline finding: the Japan-listed median sits at $148,200, the US-listed median at $192,500. Same week, same reference, same condition class. That's a $44,300 spread that has held within ±$3,000 for four consecutive weeks of measurement.
If you're a pro dealer who already knows this gap exists, the data below quantifies it. If you only track 4-5 US/UK majors (the loud-five Chrome-extension targets), this is what you're missing.
The 13 marketplaces I track
| # | Marketplace | Country | Sample size (Patek 5711) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chrono24 | EU (sellers TR/DE/IT) | 124 listings | Largest single-source sample, widest condition variance |
| 2 | WatchBox / The 1916 Company | US | 18 | Premium dealer, low listing flux |
| 3 | Bob's Watches | US | 7 | Rolex-heavy specialist, Patek is rare here |
| 4 | Watchfinder UK | UK | 12 | Richemont-group; mostly full-set |
| 5 | European Watch Co (Boston) | US | 11 | Strong Patek inventory, high-end pricing |
| 6 | Watches of Switzerland (en-int) | UK | 4 | Patek pricing often "price on request" |
| 7 | Hodinkee Shop | US | 0 (dormant) | Winding down post-WoS-Group acquisition |
| 8 | The Watch Club (London + HK) | UK | 6 | Strong cross-Pacific dealer flow |
| 9 | H. Spliedt (Munich/Hamburg/Sylt) | DE | 5 | EUR pricing, premium pre-owned |
| 10 | A Collected Man (London) | UK | 9 (live) + 213 archive | Heavy archive — mostly Sold cards |
| 11 | Analog:Shift (NYC) | US | 8 | Vintage + neo-vintage specialist |
| 12 | Bachmann & Scher (Munich) | DE | 3 | Small dealer, high-touch inventory |
| 13 | Yahoo Auctions Japan | JP | ~40 | Bilingual JP/EN listings, Buy-It-Now (即決) filter |
Total live inventory observed in the 30-day window: ~257 listings of the 5711/1A-010 (vs 213 sold/archived already, mostly on A Collected Man).
Per-country median (P50, trimmed)
I use a 10% winsorized median per country to drop the noisy edges (Chrono24 Turkish-seller undercuts, Hodinkee retail premiums). All values in USD:
| Country | Median (P50, USD) | P10 | P90 | Sample size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇯🇵 Japan (Yahoo Auctions) | $148,200 | $138,000 | $159,000 | ~40 |
| 🇪🇺 EU (Chrono24 weighted by listing country, EUR→USD) | $174,800 | $158,400 | $191,200 | 124 |
| 🇩🇪 Germany (Spliedt + Bachmann & Scher, EUR→USD) | $179,200 | $171,500 | $186,800 | 8 |
| 🇬🇧 UK (Watchfinder + WoS + Watch Club + A Collected Man, GBP→USD) | $186,400 | $174,000 | $198,300 | 31 |
| 🇺🇸 USA (WatchBox + Bob's + European Watch Co + Analog:Shift) | $192,500 | $186,000 | $201,000 | 44 |
The JP→US gap = $44,300 = 22.7% on the same reference + condition class.
Even after the realistic round-trip costs from Tokyo to a US dealer:
- 8-10% papers-only haircut (most Yahoo listings are pre-owned, ~$15k)
- JPY-USD FX volatility ~2-3%
- Customs + Brokerage + Insurance + Shipping ~$800-1,200
- US dealer 5% margin
…you still net ~$25-30k on the same watch. That's not arbitrage in the textbook sense (the gap is friction-priced, not free-money), but it's the entire trade for any dealer with the operational infrastructure to source in JP.
Why the gap persists
Three reasons that came out of the data:
1. The Japanese listings often come from estate sales. Owners want yen-cash now. The Chrono24 secondary market is not in their consideration set. They list at "fair Tokyo market" prices which historically lag the global secondary market by 6-9 months.
2. The 7 specialist platforms aren't on most arbitrage radars. Most cross-platform watch tracking tools (Watchcharts, Bezel, Chrono24 Pro itself) focus on the loud-five US/UK majors (Chrono24, WatchBox, Bob's, Watchfinder, European Watch Co). The 7 specialists I added — UK pre-owned (Watch Club, A Collected Man), DE pre-owned (Spliedt, Bachmann & Scher), NYC vintage (Analog:Shift), and Tokyo auctions (Yahoo JP) — are where the wider cross-country spreads hide.
3. The friction is real, but lower than you'd think. Yahoo JP rate-limits aggressively from non-JP IPs. That stops most casual buyers. But operationally — wire transfer to JP seller via Yodogawa-Bashi or similar, Japan Post EMS shipping with Bordereau Customs Declaration — is a known playbook for the dozen-or-so professional dealers who do this routinely.
What about other refs?
Same scrape covers the Rolex Daytona 116500LN (white dial) and the AP Royal Oak 15500ST. Tighter sample sizes, but the pattern is qualitatively similar:
Daytona 116500LN (sample n=89 cross-platform, 30 days):
- Cross-platform median: $29,646
- P10: $28,500 (Chrono24, TR-located, papers-only)
- P90: $34,500 (European Watch Co, full-set + 2yr warranty)
- 17% spread between extremes, mostly explained by papers/warranty/dealer-stamp premium — less cross-country effect than Patek
Royal Oak 15500ST (sample n=27, 30 days):
- Cross-platform median: $52,400
- P10-P90: $48,200 - $57,100
- ~8% spread — tightest of the three because AP supply is thinner, dealers price more aggressively against each other
The Reddit corroboration
I separately scraped 300 top-of-the-month posts from r/Watches, r/PatekPhilippe, and r/rolex (free Reddit JSON API, no Apify cost). Quick keyword analysis:
- 28% of top posts touch cross-country sourcing (EU/JP/UK/US import)
- 8% explicitly discuss dealer-to-dealer arbitrage or flipping
- 4% mention paying for existing tracking tools (Watchcharts $29/mo, Bezel, Chrono24 Pro)
- 5% describe authentication anxiety (fakes, polish history, frankenwatches)
The cross-country pain is real and well-distributed. The market for a 13-platform aggregator that surfaces cross-country gaps is not just my hunch — it's the dominant pain in the Reddit watch community after "what should I buy".
How I built it (one paragraph)
The scraper is a TypeScript + Crawlee + Playwright stack running on Apify's serverless infrastructure. Each marketplace has a hand-tuned crawler (the per-DOM normalization is where 95% of the work is — Bob's marks "papers only" as a checkbox, Spliedt as German text in the description, Yahoo JP as 即決-flag + Japanese kanji). Cloudflare-protected sites (Chrono24, Bob's) need Camoufox + residential proxy rotation. Yahoo JP needs apifyProxyCountry: 'JP' to bypass the EEA/UK geo-block. End-to-end cycle (scrape 13 platforms + aggregate + emit alerts): 3-4 seconds per reference.
Output schemas: MARKET_SNAPSHOT (per-ref median + P10/P90 + platforms covered), ARBITRAGE_OPPORTUNITIES (listings ≥ X% below cross-platform median), and CROSS_COUNTRY_SPREADS (every country-pair gap). Alerts dispatch via Telegram Bot API. Median computation uses a 10% trimmed mean to drop seller-undercut outliers.
Edge cases I learned the hard way
-
Yahoo JP refuses EEA/UK IPs since 2022-04-06 (LINEヤフー regulatory notice). The actor needs
proxyConfiguration.apifyProxyCountry: 'JP'— set it once or accept zero JP coverage. - Chrono24 EU sellers are noisy: Turkish sellers routinely undercut by 5-10% but with mixed paper histories. My 10% winsorized median drops these.
- Hodinkee Shop is dormant post-Watches-of-Switzerland-Group acquisition. Kept in the enum for completeness; expect 0 inventory.
- A Collected Man inventory is ~96% archive — they're a premium pre-owned + horology archive, most cards are Sold. The crawler filters these.
-
Bachmann & Scher TYPO3 URLs require a
cHashparameter that's session-bound — I scrape the unfiltered catalog and filter client-side by brand keyword.
Reproducing the data
The actor is open-source (MIT) and on the Apify Store:
- Code: github.com/DataKazKN/watch-arbitrage-mcp
- Try it free: https://apify.com/kazkn/watch-arbitrage-mcp?fpr=8fp2od
Pay-Per-Event pricing: $0.05 per reference per day to monitor, $0.50 only when a cross-platform spread alert fires. Apify's free tier ($5/mo platform credit) covers ~10 references at default sensitivity. The actor also doubles as a Model Context Protocol server — you can query it from Claude Desktop / Cursor / ChatGPT in plain language.
What I'd want to see next
If you trade these references and have access to the actual filled-price data (not just listing prices), I'd love to see whether the realized JP→US gap closes faster than the listed gap. My intuition is that listing inflation on the US side has a 4-6 week half-life and the "true" gap is closer to $35k than $44k once you settle for what dealers actually pay.
Comments welcome — particularly from anyone who's traded this gap in 2025-2026 and can ground-truth the numbers.
Built solo. Source on GitHub. No card on file for the Apify free tier.
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