How much is a handbag worth? Say £100? Maybe £500? Perhaps even £1,000?How about handing over £279,000 for one bag - and a second-hand one at that? For that price, you could buy a house in the UK and still have plenty left over. Yet astonishingly last year someone did pay that amount of money for a rare 2014 Himalaya Birkin - a matte white handbag by Hermes. It was fashioned from Nilo crocodile hide and adorned with 18-carat white gold and diamond-encrusted details. While £279,000 is a record breaking price tag for this "holy grail" of handbags, it is a drop in the ocean when it comes to the increasingly lucrative market for buying and selling pre-owned luxury "arm furniture". Auction house Christie's says the global pre-owned luxury handbag market has jumped from being worth £5.1m in 2011 to £26m in 2016. Heritage Auctions believes that the worldwide secondary auction market for the "ultra high-end bags" is between $75m and $100m "and growing". In investment terms, these assets can offer a huge return on your cash. Investment bank Jefferies reckons that some bags can generate returns of about 30% a year. Handbags made by Hermes, the French luxury goods house, are the most sought-after.
