Business Address: Virtual Office or residence address?
A Trade License or SRO Company needs to be registered at an address in Czech Republic. This can be your residence address, an office address OR you can use a virtual office.
A virtual office has some benefits over using the residence address:
- Quick Start: a Trade License can be registered before you have found a place to live,
- Landlord issues: in case the owner of your residence address does not want you to give you permission to register a Trade License,
- Drustvo issues: in case the building is owned by a drustvo (multiple owners) it can be difficult to get all signatures,
- Correspondence address: if you are temporarily abroad or you move, your mail does not get lost,
- Privacy: Your residence address in Czech Republic is not publicly shown online,
- Contract: we take care of the contract with the provider and the legal permission for the business address,
- Free Translation: Letters from the Authorities we will translate / interpret - and email you what it is about.
If you do want to use your (own) residence address or any other address for registration of your Trade License or SRO company, you will need to get the permission of the landlord(s) yourself. So if you are on good terms with him / her, you can save yourself some money.
If you are going to move soon, it is porbably better not to register at the current address - It will cost money to change a business address. Cost are comparable to 1 year of virtual address.
Starting 2023, even Trade License holders must have a datova schranka. If you have it, the authorities will no longer send paper mail,
so now we have very cheap virtual offices without mail forwarding (you can select them on the tradelicense order form)
Residence Address
A virtual office can not be used for residence purposes. It can ONLY be used to register a business. In case you apply for a (business) visa or residence permit, you will need (also / in addition) a REAL residence address, which will be your address where you will be living in Czech Republic.
If you want to use a residence address for visa / residence permit, you need permission from the landlord - Doklad o zajisteni ubytovani.pdf
Popular websites for finding a residence address:
- S Reality (probably the biggest offer in CZ)
- BezRealitky.cz (without realestate agent - direct contact with the owner)
Contact us if you have questions / a suspicious feeling about the landlord / contract BEFORE signing anything. We can contact the landlord and for us it is easy to see if the rental contract seems to be a normal one. For your visa / residence permit the landlord should provide a rental contract and sign a form for the embassy / foreign police (this is different than the permission for the Trade License, also this template we provide for free). We charge a one-time fee of 1500 CZK, which is a small fee compared to the amount of trouble you may get by signing a disadvantageous (for you) rental contract.
If the rental offer is too good to be true - it usually is. There is a shortage on the housing market. Housing is not cheap, and especially in Prague prices are comparable to other European major cities. 15.000 - 25.000 CZK per month for a small apartment (including utilities) is a 'fair' price nowadays.
A specific word of warning for people / companies offering fake residence address permissions: for a few 1000 CZK they will send you the residence address permission, maybe you get a rental contract, but in reality you can not live there. Even worse: some give the same permission for the same address to 50 people, which of course is detected by the foreign police, and most likely results in visa rejection.