Leica Lens Resale Rate - What's The Deal?

[Zack Birlew]

Hi, everybody, so I happened to be perusing another forum marketplace and noticed that there were, once again, posts for selling Leica lenses, Leica R, Leica M, Leica Cine, etc. and usually it was for only one or two lenses. This stood out as unusual to me as the usual talk is about the act of assembling a set of Leica lenses. Granted, much of this talk is about chasing after serial numbers and trying to make a matched color set and such but surely folks are doing their research before diving in as Leica lenses are big money collector's lenses. So, what gives? Why the haphazard buying and resale rate for individual Leica lenses? I've made a similar thread in the past about sets of high end Summicron-C lenses that seem to get resold fairly regularly so what's the deal here with the SLR lenses? Every time I open Instagram I am bombarded with loving posts and stories for Leica and the "Look of Leica" and such but there's plenty of other fish in the sea to my eyes when comparing lenses, however, the love is clearly there for Leica all the same.

Personal note, based on what I've seen, if I were buying Leica, I would definitely do a complete set of matched lenses and the only exception would be nabbing a Noctilux 1.0 or 0.95 for a steal just for specialty low light use. Until then, I've still got Nikon AIS, Minolta Rokkor, and Canon FD sets to finish off and round out.

Any insight and clarity into this Leica phenomena or trend would be greatly appreciated!