Even on its own, the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic would have made it very difficult to sell homes and apartments for Czech real estate agencies. But then the Czech minister of finance Alena Schillerová went and made things worse in March by proposing to end the tax on real estate acquisitions. The proposal itself would no doubt be popular, since it would reduce the cost of buying apartments by hundreds of thousands of crowns. But so far, it hasn’t been voted on by the Czech parliament, so most potential buyers are waiting for the bill to go through before completing their purchase. The irony is that the original idea was to get the slowing residential market moving again. Schillerová has said the new rule could be applied to acquisitions that take place before it’s officially approved, but most buyers aren’t willing to take that risk, since 4 percent of the total price is at stake. Hospodářské noviny writes that the state takes in around CZK 13bn annually on the tax, which was introduced in 2016. Schillerová argues that the paperwork involved in managing it employs around 500 people in the state bureaucracy at a cost of hundreds of millions.
