Finding a place to call home

Roman Čakurda's friend recently came to visit him from England, took a look around at the local real estate scene here and was aghast by what he saw. How is it, he asked Čakurda, that the Czech market seems to be fairing so much better than its Western counterparts?

Sitting at a small café next door to his offices at Bonus Group, the quickly expanding national real estate firm he helped start in 2000, Čakurda smiles and shakes his head as he recalls the conversation, saying he wishes he knew the answer to that question. Just plain luck, he muses.

"Is it a trend, or is it just this month? It's quite difficult to answer," Čakurda says, trying to characterize the precarious and unfamiliar terrain his profession has been navigating for the past several months. "They say next year will be better - I hope."

When the real estate industry first took notice of the Czech Republic, following the 1989 revolution, there was no place to go but "up, up, up," Čakurda notes. So this recession has been, more or less, a learning experience, as companies try to find their footing on what had once been very stable ground.

"Right now, the gold is the client, not the product," Čakurda says. "A few years ago, if you built it, you'd sell it." Today, though, it's a far different reality that faces Čakurda and others in the real estate business.

Still, Čakurda remains optimistic. After all, his company, Bonus Group, has spent the past year expanding. Founded nine years ago with five employees on staff, this Prague-based company now has several branches around the country and in Slovakia with more than 130 employees. In 2008, Čakurda and his team established an office in Moscow in an effort to cater to the growing number of Russians interested in purchasing property in the Czech Republic.

"Right now," he says, "we are focusing on the quality and the structure [of our projects] rather than the quantity."

Čakurda credits much of his company's success to the strong partnerships Bonus Group has built with others in the regional real estate community.

"We will reach more than one client this way," Čakurda explains. In fact, "all our clients are connected with a direct partner," many arriving on Bonus Group's doorstep by "word of mouth."

Some of Bonus Group's strongest partners include Ceres Property Services, King Sturge and, most recently, Tvo Groupe, a U.S. real estate company that is expanding its reach into Central Europe.

"We are the mediator of clients," Čakurda says. A one-stop shop that helps its clients settle into mid- to high-end residential properties around the Central and East European region, Bonus Group offers a wide range of services, from sales and leasing to development and property management. The company comes equipped with its own team of lawyers, brokers, financial experts, technical advisers and marketing specialists who are ready to assist in Czech, English and Russian.

"We are well known in the business," Čakurda says. "We just need to know what you want, and we can provide you with the services."

It would seem so. Bonus Group clients are more than happy to rave about their experience with the company, whose headquarters are down a tree-lined street in Vinohrady.

"The service from Bonus Group was perfect," says David Mareš, who recently moved back to Prague from Amsterdam. "They were helpful and took care of everything. They were very friendly when I needed some advice. I was able to call them anytime, and I got the correct information I needed."

Mareš ended up buying a spacious apartment with a rooftop terrace from the Zelený vrch project, a 140-unit development in Prague 10, currently managed by Bonus Group. A Bonus representative took Mareš on a tour of the property, introduced him to the developer and helped him negotiate any last-minute changes. Mareš says a Bonus lawyer then took care of all the paperwork and talked directly to his bank.

"He saved me a lot of time and headaches," Mareš says.

Andrea Straube, the project manager of Kajetánka, a residential development going up in Prague 6, concurs, calling the company "helpful and creative."

"Bonus got involved in our project almost two years ago. We got recommendation from one of our business partners," Straube says. "A difference I can see against other agents is that they always take the time to talk to the client and find the best solution."

Julie O'Shea can be reached at
joshea@praguepost.com