By Oliver Watts

Here's a fact that might surprise you.

There are around 300 property agents in the Czech Republic's second city of Brno, all offering to sell properties, rent them out or manage them for you. Most do all three - for a fee, of course.

Most of them are also small and many lack anything like the professionalism we in the West expect. A lot, quite frankly, are cowboys after an easy buck.

Now, let's skip forward a couple of years. That 300 number will now have shrunk by around 80 per cent. That's my prediction.