In recent years, developers have been responding to residents’ ballooning disposable income — which doubled, to about 3 billion crowns, or more than $144 million, in 2006, from about 1.5 billion crowns, or about $72 million at current rates, in 1995. And mortgage rates have dropped to about 4 percent in 2004 from around 11 percent in 1998.  But “competition does not allow any greater price increases in the lower segment,” according to a report in December by the Association for Real Estate Market Development, a Czech trade group. In contrast, the report said, luxury apartments in Prague are selling for 60,000 crowns per square meter, about $265 per square foot, or more, because there is a “significantly limited” supply.  For nearly 20 years, luxury apartments were found almost exclusively in the city center and were individual renovation projects. Even now, only a handful of high-end developments have more than a couple hundred apartments.  One of those is Central Park Praha, which will overlook Parukarka Park when construction is wrapped up next year. The site is a 15-minute drive from the city center. Its developer, Milan Ganik, said luxury builders in Prague had shied away from large projects because they might remind people of the dreary concrete apartment blocks built all over Eastern Europe under communism. “People said we were crazy because we said we were putting in 600 luxury apartments,” Mr. Ganik said.  So far, about 40 percent of the building’s apartments have sold, and Mr. Ganik says he has commitments for another 20 percent at prices around 100,000 crowns per square meter, or $440 per square foot. The typical buyers are mixed Czech and foreign couples or Czechs returning to the country after having lived abroad, he said.  Asked to compare the current luxury market with that of several years ago, Mr. Ganik replied, “There wasn’t any.” And Ms. Crossick’s customers did well in Prague recently. In 2004, Ready2Invest brokered the sale of 78 Central Park Praha apartments at an average price of 54,000 crowns per square meter, or $238 per square foot.  In March, Colliers International real estate agency valued the final-phase units now on the market at 79,400 crowns per square meter, or $350 per square foot. River Diamond, another high-end project being built along the Vltava River, went on the market in 2004. Nearly all of its 230 apartments, priced at 52,000 to 92,000 crowns per square meter, or $229 to $405 per square foot, have been sold.  Petr Vojak, a real estate broker with the Lexxus agency, which represented River Diamond, said about 65 percent of its buyers were foreign. Mr. Vojak said Prague still lured international investors, despite the opening of riskier but possibly more lucrative markets like Romania and Bulgaria, because “they feel comfortable here.” Like Mr. Ganik, he links the continuing appeal of the Czech Republic’s capital partly to its established system of legal and tax advice, and mortgages. “These things are working here,” Mr. Vojak said.  Robert Scanlon, a tax adviser in Dublin who has arranged the sale of about 30 apartments in Prague for himself and his clients over the last few years, said he had looked all over Central and Eastern Europe for a place to put investors’ money. Romania’s development is too far into the future, he said, and some Irish investors still bear the scars of Bulgarian schemes that have collapsed. “It was sort of blindingly obvious to me that the Czech Republic was the obvious choice for what I wanted to do,” Mr. Scanlon said. “It’s seen massive growth but it still has a ways to go. It’s a stable country, with good laws.”  Investing in Prague, then, is no longer like prospecting in the Klondike. When it comes time to sell, high-end investors might not leave with bags of money but will not go away empty-handed. The same is true, more or less, of the rents they can expect to collect in the meantime. According to the real-estate market association, rents in Prague had fallen 50 percent by 2004 from 1998 — Prague’s “Wild East” days, when multinationals were setting up offices in an underdeveloped housing market and paying a premium for hard-to-get high-end properties. “You can’t do what I did anymore,” Mr. Barner said. “I was in such good shape because I was in at the top of the market.” He landed in Prague after selling a successful sports management business.  But the luxury market is stable today, with monthly rents of 251 crowns to 500 crowns per square meter, or $1.10 to $2.20 per square foot, the trade group reported. And it sees nothing on the horizon to shake up the market, although two trends could jiggle it a bit.  The first is the planned phase-out of rent control by 2012, which could throw more city center apartments onto the market. (About 17 percent of the country’s apartments are rent-controlled.) These will most likely be renovated into high-end apartments, but given the continuing demand, the industry group foresees only a slight drop in prices, if any.  The second is the possibility that mortgage rates, which are around 4.2 percent, will rise. Higher rates, combined with the country’s aging population, could mean fewer young people seeking starter apartments. “The interest will shift toward larger flats of a family nature,” the industry report predicted.  In short, no earthquakes threaten, and no get-rich-quick schemes beckon. Instead, Prague as an investment has become an affordable alternative to Western Europe and a safer place than much of Eastern Europe. “It’s not sexy,” Mr. Breaux acknowledged. “But it’s good-looking.”
The post-communism housing boom is over in Prague, but a mature market of high-end housing provides investors modest returns with little risk.