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Raising the standard

CERES Group's 'one-stop shop' concept influences Prague's real estate market

By Kathleen Kralowec
For The Prague Post
February 21st, 2007 issue

RENÉ JAKL/THE PRAGUE POST
Stefan Cordiner, Greg Gibb and Gal Peleg are the brains behind CERES Group.
How do you improve a product that’s already so good it sells itself? CERES Group, which has quickly made a name for itself on Prague’s sizzling real estate scene, thinks it has the answer.
Aside from touting some of the most lucrative developments in the Golden City, the 3-year-old company says it differentiates itself by offering the most complete high-quality service package possible, which includes everything from tax advice to concierge and airport services.
“In the beginning,” says Stefan Cordiner, CERES’s managing director, “we started as a company only dealing in the support services for property transactions — such as legal, company formations and mortgages — but quickly discovered that the local estate agencies were inflexible. Prospective buyers needed basic things like viewings after 5 p.m. or on weekends. … Our agency division really formed out of these demands.”
CERES, which was founded in 2004, has established itself as a “one-stop shop” for real estate, placing all the parties involved in a transaction under one roof and making the process as smooth as possible for the client.
The 55 employees in CERES’s Prague office range from tax advisers to accountants. The common link between them is not, as one might expect, experience in real estate, but rather, what Investment Director Greg Gibb calls a “service-oriented approach” to customers.
“You can teach anyone real estate,” Gibb says. “What you can’t teach someone is customer-focus and a genuine sense of hospitality.”
CERES caters to high-end customers, who generally have a lot of cash and are looking to expand on their real estate investment reach across Europe. The company’s management team describes its typical client as a professional investor who already has between 30 and 40 properties around the Continent and is looking to Prague as the site of a possible 10 more. The company also boasts a number of individual foreign investors who are interested in establishing international real estate portfolios.
CERES Group

Address: Na Příkopě 15
Tel.: 420 272 143 513
Web: www.ceres-group.com
E-mail: enquiries@ceres-group.com
Founded: 2004
Annual transactions: 35 million euros ($45.5 million/980 million Kč)

“Our customers range from plumbers to [just about] … everything,” says Cordiner, who moved to Prague after spending years working in London.
About 70 percent of CERES customers come from the United Kingdom and Ireland, according to Cordiner. While most of their business transactions are on the residential market, Cordiner says he is seeing more and more clients turning to venture hotels and commercial properties.
The company’s one-stop concept arose as a solution to the common challenges foreign investors experience when trying to purchase property in the Czech Republic.
“We had a wave of clients from Romania and Bulgaria,” Gibb explains. “They had been misled or given wrong information, basically ripped off, and they were nervous.”
Gibb is quick, however, to point out that Prague is a sophisticated market, which provides more certainty to investors when compared to other countries in the region.
“In terms of risk versus return, Prague is the most solid and secure investment option” in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), he says. “We also believe that it’s setting the benchmark for the rest of the region.”
CERES currently has 13 branches in three CEE countries, including Georgia and Slovakia, and managers say they are planning to expand into Hungary, Poland, Armenia and Serbia by the end of 2007. The company headquarters in Prague currently does 35 million euros ($45.5 million/980 million Kč) in transactions a year. Cordiner says he hopes to reach 150 million euros by 2010.
The company managers say they have learned a lot from mistakes made by Prague real estate agencies in the early ’90s, when the market just started taking off.
Operations Director Gal Peleg, who has a background in law, says one key problem with the Prague real estate market nowadays centers on communication.
“Mortgage brokers don’t talk to lawyers; lawyers don’t talk to developers,” he says. “There’s a disconnect between the key parties, and it stalls a lot of business. That’s why we put all the parts of this process under one roof, so that all the parties are linked together and there’s control over the whole process.”
In addition, “ours is a synergic system, with the minimum transaction cost,” Peleg adds. “We are able to give the package to the client through one point of contact. … The client literally has to sign only one document, and we take it from there.”

Kathleen Kralowec can be reached at specialsection@praguepost.com


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