Like many service-oriented businesses, European Reality was born of one man's frustration with a glaring gap in the market. "To be honest with you, I'd moved around a few times myself, and the service I had from the rental agencies here was absolutely appalling," says Jimmy Williams, 31, the company's managing director. "There are lots of horror stories in Prague, and that was the main driver. My prime objective was to provide genuine services to genuine people, which I didn't get when I was looking around."

That was three years ago. Williams, an Englishman with no professional background in real estate, rented 10 square meters (108 square feet) of office space in Malá Strana, switched on his laptop and got to work researching the market. Pulling his first few clients in through his Web site, he proceeded to tackle a learning curve to which he fondly and frequently refers as "huge, massive and steep."

Today, European Reality has six employees and plans to add another nine to its ranks over the next eight months. The company offers rental, sales, property management and accountancy services, and will move into a 160-square meter office on Wenceslas Square in March.

Having spent the past three years studying the local market and offering a broad array of services, Williams says he wants to focus more tightly on European Reality's core areas of business and expand rapidly into a couple new ones. Business is booming in rentals, he says, with 200 apartments currently available to tenants and another several hundred coming up, courtesy of investors purchasing flats in new buildings. European Reality is well-established in expat circles, helping many transplants establish themselves in homes, and is moving steadily into the local market, with a clientele that is now about 40 percent Czech.

Now that he's established a solid track record renting flats to tenants, Williams intends to make the logical progression to working more closely with landlords. Property management and accountancy services will be the big push for European Reality in the next year, focused largely on investors who have purchased blocks of flats in new buildings such as Nová Harfa, Repy, River Diamond and River Lofts.

Along with rental-focused services, Williams and his colleagues will continue to provide services to local and international investors looking to buy and sell flats. In a year, Williams says, "Property management will be in full swing, sales should be ticking over quite nicely and accountancy will just be starting to kick in. We'll be a very different company. These are very exciting times."

The developments will pit the young company against bigger and longer-established agencies in Prague, but Williams is confident in his ability to compete. For one thing, he says, European Reality has an expat core — which should attract other expats who want to communicate their problems, questions and anxieties without language difficulty. He also points proudly to the company's ethos and mentality of listening to its customers. As long as the company pays attention to what it does best, he says, European Reality will be continue to be successful.

"It comes down to genuine customer service, honesty and loyalty," Williams explains. "My clients can come sit in front of me and say, 'This is what I want, Jim, but I don't want you to lead me down a path.' If they're looking to buy a new building, they feel comfortable asking me to negotiate a better deal for them. They know they can say, 'This is a budget, I really need to stick to it,' and we'll give them genuine customer service.