The Economic Committee today recommended to the Chamber of Deputies to approve an amendment that will extend the deadline for proving the expertise of real estate agents until the end of the year. At the proposal of the Ministry of Regional Development (MRD), brokers would have to report to the Trade Licensing Office for a tied trade within this period and prove their integrity. Due to measures against coronavirus, the House has already extended the deadline once. However, it ended on March 3.
“We have prepared a comprehensive amendment that means a special lex covid for real estate agents. When will they be able to operate by the end of the year. I think there is some tolerance in place today. We did not anticipate that such a massive second wave would come and last so long, “said MP Vojtech Munzar (ODS), one of the proposers.
The proponents justified the amendment by the persistence of anti-coronavirus restrictions, when some intermediaries need to convert their trade from a free to a bound trial. At the end of January, the Ministry of Regional Development estimated that dozens of entities did not yet have a professional qualification, one to two percent of the total number.
Originally, real estate agents had to prove their expertise by the beginning of last September. Legislators postponed the deadline by half a year last April due to the coronavirus crisis. “Given the duration of the epidemic, it is clear that even such a postponed date can be liquidation for some people doing business in this area,” the petitioners wrote in the justification of the current amendment. At the time of the amendment, ie in mid-January, they estimated that there could be 400 to 700 intermediaries without tests.
The new law on real estate mediation, which the Ministry of Regional Development had been ongoing for eight years and entered into force at the beginning of last March. Its main goal is to improve the functioning of the real estate market and protect clients from real estate agencies.
According to the latest available data from the European Statistical Office Eurostat from 2017, the number of inhabitants per real estate broker in the Czech Republic was roughly half that of the European Union average. In the Czech Republic it was 909 people per broker, the EU average was 1653. The lowest was in Luxembourg (567), the most in Greece (4126). In the Czech Republic, the number of inhabitants per real estate broker was the fourth lowest in EU countries. According to last year’s data from statisticians at the end of 2018, there were 14,602 business entities in the Czech Republic that applied for intermediary activities.
