A Top-Floor Pad in Prague’s Art Nouveau Corridor
$2.45 MILLION (51.4 MILLION CZECH KORUNA)
This two-bedroom apartment is on the fifth floor of a landmark building on Parizska Street, a historic strip of Art Nouveau design and high-end shopping in central Prague. The 1,260-square-foot home, built in 1907 and renovated in 2012, comes fully furnished with mostly custom-made pieces.
“This home is special due its unique location,” said Jan Kolar, the broker of Czech Republic Sotheby’s International Realty, which has the listing, adding that it “stands out thanks to its mixture of architecture of Art Nouveau and historicism, and its dominant tower in the front which no visitor of Parizska Street can miss.”
The work done in 2012 was a complete reconstruction, Mr. Kolar said, including “everything from creating the current layout, new floors, new bathrooms, new pipes, new electric wiring, to custom-made built-in furniture, kitchen, wall paint, wallpaper, decorative ceilings,” he said.
according to the Czech Statistical Office, with more accelerated growth beginning in 2016. By 2020, prices had grown 51 percent over their 2010 levels, far outpacing wage growth. According to a 2020 study by the financial consultancy Deloitte, Czech buyers must pay 11.4 times the average annual salary to purchase a 750-square-foot home, the highest rate in Europe.
Peter Yusufi, the general manager of Czech Republic and Slovakia Sotheby’s International Realty, said buyers in Prague, as elsewhere, view real estate as “a safe bet in light of global fears of inflation” and currency devaluation. This, along with greater demand for second homes and investors scooping up “large portfolios of rental units,” has led to heightened demand for real estate during the pandemic.
Colliers, leading to a record number of approved mortgages during 2020, even as prices continued to rise. Now those rates are starting to climb again: “Some banks have begun to marginally increase interest rates on new mortgages in hopes of slowing down demand given the record high prices,” Mr. Yusufi said.
Mr. Svoboda said a chronically slow building-permit process is behind the low supply. “In average, it takes almost 10 years for real estate developers to get a building permit,” he said. “The effort to streamline and speed it up has been halted due to the coronavirus crisis, and developers launched the construction of only 3,246 apartments last year — a year-on-year decrease of 40 percent.”