Spilberk group: how two Brno men built a CZK 2.5bn property fund

The Brno investment group Spilberk, founded by lawyer Robert Sedláček and engineer Martin Pěnčík, grew from the renovation of an old house into a fund with assets of about 2.5 billion crowns. Their recipe is simple: buy neglected buildings cheaply, renovate them, divide them into small apartments and sell. Today the partners take on only projects of 100 apartments or more.

Spilberk’s headquarters is next to Brno’s main railway station, in an area that is now undergoing a large-scale transformation but was previously considered run-down. This also reflects the company’s philosophy: the bet is on small apartments. “Brno is a city of students and IT people,” the owners explain. At the same time, they are cautiously expanding from Brno further west and east.

Sedláček came to real estate through law. After grammar school and law studies, he joined the law office of Roman Hejduk, where he helped investors buy dilapidated tenement houses, divide them into individual apartments and sell them. Instead of a fee he sometimes negotiated an apartment for himself, and that is how his first small portfolio took shape. He has worked as a lawyer for 25 years and still sets aside time for criminal law: “Real estate is rather lifeless, while criminal law has real stories.”

His father, after the revolution, collected documents in the archives for restitution claims and managed some of the returned houses in Brno’s Zábrdovice. Now the son demolishes old buildings in the same district and builds new ones.

Pěnčík’s path was different. He studied in Austria, graduated from a mechanical engineering school and from Brno University of Technology (VUT), specializing in chemical equipment. Thanks to the connections of his father, a former production director at Zetor, and his knowledge of German, he got a job at a company transporting oversized cargo. “We hauled entire power plants for Vítkovice or Škoda Export, and sometimes used huge Ruslan aircraft,” he recalls.

The partners met around 2006 during the reconstruction of a tenement house in Královo Pole. Their first joint project was a narrow house on Rumiště Street near the center of Brno, which used to be a recycling collection point. In 2017, 21 small apartments appeared there, and all of them were sold immediately.

Curiously, even before their first construction project they decided to operate not as an ordinary limited liability or joint-stock company, but as an investment fund. That was rare at the time, and they went to Prague for advice, where Avant’s founder Pavel Doležal personally helped them. The Spilberk fund was established in June 2016. Today there are more than six hundred qualified investor funds in the Czech Republic; back then there were only dozens.

Spilberk was created “backwards”: the fund was practically empty, and the founders had only a few million in savings and a loan from their parents. Under the statutes, the assets had to be filled within a year, and that did not work out. “Honestly, we were making everything up as we went,” Pěnčík admits.

Gradually they got back on track, and the project on the site of the former recycling point helped a great deal. The turning point was 2019 and Vlhká Street: a four-story house with nine large apartments, after three more floors were added on top, became 60 units. The partners repaid the loan six months after the first tranche because they already had advance payments from buyers.