2005 was the year of the shopping center in Prague and across the Czech Republic. In the past 12 months, eight either opened or expanded, including three in Prague alone. Investment in the retail market is likely to top 500 million euros ($590 million/14.4 billion Kč) by the end of the year — nearly double the amount invested in 2004, according to figures compiled by Jones Lang LaSalle.

"Retail development has been the key sector for the last 18 months," says Mark Richardson, a real estate adviser with Cushman & Wakefield/Healy & Baker. Nearly half of every crown spent on development in the past seven years has been in the retail sector, and according to Richardson, basically all of that has been for the construction of shopping centers.

The massive 55,000-square-meter (592,015-square-foot) Centrum Chodov won't be the newest shopping center for long — as many as eight more could be completed nationwide in 2006.

"People always say to me, 'Another shopping center? Don't we have enough?' " Richardson says. "But in the next couple of years there will be quite a lot of space coming online."

"The Czech Republic is still underprovided," he adds. "It is still catching up with the rest of Europe."

And so is the rest of the region. Of the top 15 markets with the greatest proportional increase in shopping-center floor space in the past five years, 12 are in Central and Eastern Europe, with Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic topping the list, according to C&W/H&B reports.

In Western Europe, shopping centers evolved to meet existing demand, but as Richardson notes, in Central and Eastern Europe, shopping centers have been built with the idea that demand will follow.

"If there is a benchmark for this growth, it is probably when Italy and Spain joined" the European Union, he says. In those countries, some high-end shops began soliciting customers who did not yet have the ability to pay for their products, but sales soon increased. The same is happening here, Richardson says, as developers take a lesson from Italy and Spain: "You can influence shopping habits."

The Czech Republic has several factors that make the country fertile ground for shopping centers to bloom.

Population density is one. With around 130 people per square kilometer, the country's population is less dense than the EU average of 166, but still dense enough to make centers viable.

Perhaps more important is urbanization. The Czech Republic trails only Russia as the most urbanized country in Eastern Europe, with 75 percent of its population living in cities. Add a growing post-EU-accession economy and a population with an increasing amount of disposable income, and you've got a boom. By the end of the decade, there will be 22 shopping centers in Prague and a total of 57 nationwide — all just 13 years after the first one opened.

Where does it end?

"There comes a point when you can only have so many shopping centers," says Richardson, who believes the Czech Republic's threshold is not far off. "By 2008, 2009 you will have reached critical mass."

Indeed, there are only three shopping centers scheduled to be completed after 2008 in the Czech Republic.

As the building boom cools, certain centers will begin to separate themselves from the rest, which will be reflected in rental rates. "Good schemes will get the higher rent," Richardson says. "At bad schemes, rent will stay the same."

Currently, the average rent for shopping center space in Prague is only 50 euros per square meter — half the average price in Budapest, and less than one-tenth what it is in London.