Whisky +191.7%, furniture +140.9%, watches +125.1% — and why that is not the comparison
The Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index ten-year table has rare whisky up 191.7%, antique furniture 140.9%, watches 125.1% — and coloured diamonds up 3.8%. A useful table, routinely misused against property. Here is the honest comparison with a Dubai apartment.
Knight Frank tracks KFLII, a basket of ten passion assets that wealthy owners buy for pleasure and, increasingly, for return. Here is the ten-year change as of Q4 2024:
| Asset | 10-year change |
|---|---|
| Rare whisky | +191.7% |
| Furniture | +140.9% |
| Watches | +125.1% |
| Handbags | +85.5% |
| KFLII overall | +72.6% |
| Cars | +58.9% |
| Art | +54.0% |
| Coins | +47.5% |
| Wine | +37.4% |
| Jewellery | +33.5% |
| Coloured diamonds | +3.8% |
Start with the spread
Inside one basket the range runs from +3.8% to +191.7% over a decade. This is not "luxury goes up" — it is "a few categories went up and others sat still for ten years". The index as a whole returned +72.6%, roughly 5.6% a year compounded.
Coloured diamonds at +3.8% over ten years are a useful reminder of what an asset that "always appreciates" looks like in a table rather than in a sales pitch.
Why the comparison with property is usually wrong
"Whisky beat real estate" is a headline, not an analysis. The assets differ structurally, not by a few percentage points:
- Cash flow. An apartment pays you monthly. A bottle pays nothing until it is sold; the entire return is a single price difference realised once.
- Cost of ownership. Property has service charge and maintenance. Collectibles have climate-controlled storage, insurance and authentication — and with whisky and wine, the additional risk of degrading the asset by storing it badly.
- Liquidity. A Dubai apartment sells on an open market with a public transaction record at the Land Department. A rare watch or a piece of furniture sells at auction: house commission, waiting for the right sale, no guarantee the right bidder shows up this season.
- Price transparency. Any Dubai building has registered comparables you can pull. A collectible is worth an estimate until the hammer falls.
- Scalability. A property portfolio scales. A collection does not — a second identical bottle does not double the result, because rarity is the value.
Where Dubai property sits on this picture
In our database as of 14 August 2026 the median price per square foot in Dubai is AED 2,433 — about AED 26,200 per square metre — with a median listing at $1.13m. Gross rental yields in the city generally land in the 5–8% range before costs, and that income arrives every year regardless of what the capital value did.
So the honest framing is not "191.7% versus X%". It is: a collectible may deliver more at exit, pays nothing along the way and costs money to hold; property pays continuously and lets you model the outcome in advance.
Which one fits which objective
- You need income — to live on, to service a mortgage, to support a residence visa: property, and nothing else on that list qualifies.
- You want to preserve and pass on capital with some enjoyment attached: collectibles work as a portfolio component, not as its base.
- You need a fast exit: neither. Liquid property sells in weeks; a collection sells in seasons.
We work on the first objective. Current below-market stock is in the catalogue, district-level pricing in areas, and if you want a specific unit modelled end to end, write to us.
Source: Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index (KFLII), Q4 2024, ten-year change.