Let's evaluate both options: of course, real estate agencies in Czechia look quite solid, and turning to them inspires confidence that the transaction will be carried out professionally and without errors. However, it is worth considering, for example, that the activities of neither private realtors nor agencies are specifically regulated by law.
This means that anyone can call themselves an agency or broker without mandatory insurance for potential damage to clients, without passing qualification exams, without regular state inspections. It is also worth distinguishing between genuinely Czech agencies and those founded by people from former Soviet Union countries.
Each of these two groups has its own disadvantages and advantages: "genuine" Czech agencies take their firm's image seriously, devote time and allocate funds to broker training, have a permanent lawyer, and most importantly, have an established clientele, which greatly simplifies preparatory work. Often an agency buys and sells the same apartment or house several times and can tell you a lot about the property's history and the reliability of the owners.
But what you will hardly find in Czech realtors that we are used to: Czech agencies sell exclusively their own properties. A suggestion to "scan the market" and find something personal for you will hit a wall of misunderstanding; you will again be persistently offered to consider the agency's own options. And since there are very few large agencies in Czechia, you will have to schedule meetings and viewings at different offices with different people – i.e., the intention to entrust everything to good hands will not be realized.
A large agency can provide a sufficient number of options for selection, but usually such firms also behave more strictly towards clients: their service fees are significantly higher, and it is difficult to negotiate a refund of the deposit if you change your mind. Especially since the lawyer in such an agency is usually a good professional, and convincing him of your correctness based on the law will be difficult.
And in any case, Czechs do not understand our usual "fast" style in business: viewings will be scheduled a week ahead, document preparation will be done depending on the lawyer's workload. That is, within a typical two-week trip, you can manage to see only 5-10 options, with no time left for documents.
In agencies opened by our compatriots, everything will be familiar to you – they will understand you better than in a Czech agency, and the housing standards you are used to will not need to be explained. Work will be intensive, they will show you many options, and additional information will be requested and obtained within a day.
But there are serious downsides too: for well-known reasons, owners of Czech properties prefer to turn to their own Czech firms (usually by recommendation and with positive experience of cooperation). This means that foreign agencies find it difficult to build a good portfolio of listings, and it sometimes happens that the options offered to you are simply taken from Czech real estate websites. If you like something, the broker will try to negotiate with a colleague from the agency that owns the listing.
There is nothing wrong with that. But the client is not always informed that the agency has no connection to the offered property. The Czech agency is not always interested in giving up part of the commission; it might plan to handle the sale itself. That is, only the less popular options will be realistically available to you. Also, you should not fully trust brokers just because you miss your native language abroad; an unscrupulous agent can easily convince you of the area's prospects, the uniqueness of the price, etc., simply to sell you something.
And another important point: often buyers or sellers of real estate try to contact as many agencies as possible, naively believing that this will involve more effort and the deal will be faster and more advantageous. Ask your realtor acquaintances about their attitude to non-exclusive listings: they will accept your order, but will only spend time on it after more guaranteed requests are completed. Czech agencies do not participate in such races; you might receive offers from them two weeks after signing a contract with another firm.
It turns out that in such a case, the order goes not to the firm that will spend a lot of time and provide you with a quality solution, but to the one that responds first and manages to convince the client that they have exactly what you need.
If you are used to relying on your own efforts and want to save money, it is quite realistic to study real estate websites in Czechia; you can start with just two: sreality.cz (the largest portal, has a Russian language option, but descriptions often remain in Czech, has many convenient features – search by radius and waiting list request, for example) and bezrealitky.cz (you can find those trying to do without brokers; the site has sample documents and a price map). Using the online dictionary slovnik.seznam.cz, you can figure out the property characteristics yourself.
Next – viewings; for document preparation, you can turn to a lawyer or notary. This option suits those who already have a feel for the market; it is good to have local acquaintances who could provide missing information. And, of course, you need a lot of time. The fact is that when trying to sell property through ads in Czechia, they usually focus only on the positive aspects of a given offer, while the negative ones are revealed directly during the viewing.
Regarding saving on agency commissions: thought patterns make us consider the transaction amount as the cost of the property plus the cost of agency services. In practice, in a positive scenario, the agency will save you a more significant amount than it charges for services, and in a negative scenario, it will lead to an unprofitable purchase (or sale) and still charge for the work. So the cost of agency services is not as important as the quality of its work. The difficulty is only that an unprepared client can judge the agency only by indirect factors (experience, personnel, office, communication), the main one being the experience of acquaintances whom they can trust.
Based on materials from Delpraga.com.