Figures gathered by the online real estate platform Sreality, operated by the largest Czech internet search engine Seznam, clearly show that the property market is coming back to life. Seznam shared them on its news portal.
Housing as a sought-after commodity
According to Seznam's data analysts, year-on-year interest in buying flats grew by almost five percent, and the growth in the number of listings viewed by individual users is even sharper. At the same time, the period that flats for sale spend on the listing portal is getting shorter – by almost a month. A chapter entirely of its own are listings offering flats for rent. Apart from utterly exceptional cases where a flat simply will not let – typically for the reasons we examined in a separate article in the Flat Service guide – individual listings usually stay in the catalogues of real estate portals for no more than a few days. Among the factors pushing people towards rental housing are still relatively high mortgage rates hovering around the five percent mark. And that despite the fact that the growth in rents mirrors trends on the mortgage market.
Going without an agency can also mean going without (more) money
The fact that a flat disappears from the listings within a few hours is not always the best news, however. That is confirmed by the case of Kristýna, whose full identity is known to the editors of the Flat Service blog. Kristýna inherited a one-room flat in Pankrác, an attractive location within walking distance of the metro and of the local office buildings where tens of thousands of people work.
Kristýna lived in Pankrác throughout her student years. Perhaps that is why she failed to realise what her property was worth on the rental market
Starting a family with her husband, however, meant she would need to look for far larger accommodation and offer her compact flat for rent. Kristýna advertised the flat on a portal specialising in connecting property owners with people looking to buy or rent, without using the services of a real estate agency. She made a fundamental mistake, though, when setting the rent she expected. “I put something over ten thousand there, which was the price I'd have been willing to pay for a similar flat on my own income,” Kristýna explains. But within literally a few dozen minutes it turned out that the gut-feeling “I'll look out of the window and see” method is not suitable for cases like this.
Setting the rent – go by data, not by impressions
“I published the listing on the portal at about ten in the evening, switched off notifications and went to bed. In the morning I had over fifty e-mails in my inbox. Of those, 48 said they'd take the flat immediately, and 2 said I was a bitch and should drop dead,” Kristýna laughs.
Her rather hasty approach cost Kristýna a lot of money. In the end she gave in to emotion and rented the flat to a student with a dog whom everyone else had turned down
The problem is that her approach did her more harm than good. Working through fifty applicants is extremely difficult and thankless work in which you risk “over-picking”, as it were, or running into all sorts of fraudsters and chancers. It is hard to assess their suitability by objective criteria, and so in the end personal sympathies won out along with subjective impressions from one of the first viewings held. Kristýna simply cancelled the rest of them. When they find themselves in a similar situation, some owners resolve the matter by holding a kind of “auction”, writing round to individual applicants and asking what maximum rent they would be willing to accept. Besides being time-consuming, such conduct can also spark unpleasant conflicts and strike some applicants as downright undignified.
How much should you offer your flat for?
How can you avoid all of the above? Alongside the collection of rent, arranging all the administrative formalities, repairs and maintenance, the services of a professional property management company also include handling this initial process of choosing the ideal tenant. It is precisely thanks to our almost two decades of experience with arranging rental housing in the capital and its immediate surroundings that we can promise we will price your flat correctly and offer it at exactly the level that will find it new occupants straight away. And all that without you having to hold dozens of viewings, worry about threatening e-mails and wonder whether, in trying to put it on the market “without an agency”, you should have set a completely different price. Would you like to know how much we can rent out your flat for, hassle-free? Call us on +420 277 000 330 or send a message to sales@flatservice.cz. We will be happy to arrange a personal meeting, come and view the flat, and calculate – free of charge and with no obligation – how much income you can expect from us. We promise you will most likely be pleasantly surprised.
