PRAGUE -- It was curiosity, more than blind ambition, that lured Jean-Francois Ott to Prague.

Inspired by television broadcasts of revelers, intoxicated by freedom, tearing down the Berlin Wall, and witnessing every other Soviet satellite regime topple in its wake, the Frenchman climbed into his car with his wife in March 1990 and drove the 10 hours from his native Paris to Prague. What he found when he arrived - just four months after demonstrators dismantled the country's communist regime - was a city beautifully preserved and gloomily underdeveloped.

"It was beautiful and gray," Mr. Ott remembers. "I immediately fell in love. Initially, I just wanted to buy a flat along the Vltava River to have on the weekends. Then I heard the prices."

Finding property rates remarkably low, Mr. Ott, a 35-year-old former options trader in Paris, suddenly saw Prague as more than just a place to spend weekends. Instead of a flat, Mr. Ott used his private savings to buy a building, which led to two which spawned four more which today has grown into the Orco Property Group, one of Prague's fastest-growing real-estate developers. Last year, Mr. Ott's company also joined an elite handful of firms with Central European assets to successfully go public on a Western stock exchange. Since launching its IPO Dec. 15, 2000 on the Paris Stock Exchange, the company has sold more than 600,000 shares at 17 euros each, injecting more than 10 million euros into the concern.

Listed as a Luxembourg-based company, Orco opened in 1991 and today owns 15 properties in Prague, mostly turn-of-the-century apartment and office buildings -- Art Nouveau and Deco darlings built between 1880 and 1920 -- that are renovated and targeted to successful Czechs and expatriates. Five more are currently being renovated. Rents for the luxury flats range between 25 marks (13 euros) and 30 marks per square meter per month. Offices run between 28 marks and 34 marks per square meter per month. Clients include Philip Morris Co., Coca-Cola Co., KPMG Consulting, Eastman Kodak Corp. and Unisys Corp.

A core money-generator for Orco is also the Residence Masaryk, a 15-unit "aparthotel" where clients stay on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis and includes the details cherished by incoming managers and CEOs: multiple cable TV and phone lines, underground parking garages and 24-hour security and Internet access. Weekly prices range from 850 marks for a studio to 2,400 marks for a three-bedroom suite.

Mr. Ott says he is banking on more multinational companies moving into the area, in need of office space and flats for their staff. The numbers appear to be on his side: According to Patria Finance, foreign direct investment in the Czech Republic has jumped from $1.4 billion in 1996 (or 2.5% of the country's gross domestic product) to $4.6 billion in 2000 (9.3% of GDP), bringing not only money to the economy but foreign staffs as well.

"We were looking for a building in this neighborhood," says Silva Rathova, office manager at KPMG. "Only Orco was able to offer something that met our requirements in the location we were looking."

Born and educated in Paris, Mr. Ott worked for a year in South Korea in the finance department of the French nuclear company Framatome before becoming an options trader with Banque Union Europeenne in Paris. After his scouting trip to Prague, he returned to Paris, resigned and headed back to Prague to start Orco Property Group. At the time, Prague's real-estate market was still mostly state-owned and what was for sale wasn't established. "Nobody knew any prices of anything," says Mr. Ott, who still lives in Paris. "So I made them up. That's one thing being a market-maker taught me." He says he bought his first building on Manesova street, a five-story 1880 apartment building, for $200,000, renovated it for $100,000 and sold it three years later for around $1 million.

Orco then began honing in on Prague's Vinohrady neighborhood. Once the site of the emperor's vineyards, Vinohrady has bloomed into a mostly residential area peppered with parks, shops and shady squares just behind the city's National Museum. Lined with block after block of late 19th-century buildings, it has also become of one of the most sought-after sectors of Prague's real-estate market, says Jarmila Knight, executive vice president of the Central European Real Estate Association Network. Orco owns all its buildings in Vinohrady, ranging from the 2,500-square-meter office building on Anglicka occupied by KPMG to Orco's five-story headquarters on Londynska.

It's a good time to be exploring real estate in Prague, too, local brokers and analysts say. An increase both in clients looking for high-quality renovated buildings and developers offering them have lowered monthly commercial rent rates in the downtown area from 60 marks per square meter five years ago to between 38 marks and 40 marks today, says Martin Skalicky, an associate partner at Healey & Baker in Prague. Prices are expected to bottom out in the next few years, he adds, then begin a gradual climb again as the Czech Republic heads toward European Union membership, slated for 2004.

"Generally, the real-estate market in the Czech Republic has left its infancy and is on its way to maturity," Mr. Skalicky says.

But when Mr. Ott's vision began to expand beyond Prague and into Budapest, Bratislava and the Balkans, he realized he needed more money. With a background in markets, Mr. Ott says he always knew he would to take his company public, rather than secure private equity.

"The only way we could have the freedom of being our own entrepreneurs, to have our own directions and strategies, was to go public," he says. He chose the Paris Stock Exchange (now merged into Euronext) for two central reasons: A listing on a Western market would bolster the company's credibility and prestige. And he knew the French markets and people within them.

IPOs, however, are a rarity in the Czech Republic and in Central Europe in general. None of the 160 listings on the Prague Stock Exchange are true, capital-generating IPOs, most arising from privatization deals of the 1990s. Of the thousands of firms listed on the Frankfurt, London, Paris and New York stock exchanges, only 88 originate from Central and Eastern Europe, and most of those are secondary listings or GDRs (global depositary receipts), not true IPOs, exchange spokesmen say. The high costs of advisers, bankers and auditors involved in launching an IPO coupled with the relatively small potential for big payoffs make it unfeasible for most firms in the region to go public, explains Ondrej Datka, an equity analyst with Patria Finance in Prague.

Mr. Ott, as well, says he found it difficult warming Western banks to the idea of Central European investments during his nine-month preparation for Orco's IPO.

"They kept explaining to us how there is no good investment in Central Europe," he says. "They just don't know what's out here."

Mr. Ott says he plans to use the capital raised from the IPO, plus other money generated from Orco ventures, to create an ambitious chain of four-star "charm hotels" stretching across Central Europe. The hotels will be renovated from historical buildings and rooms will rent for around $150 a night. The first one, the 71-room Andrassy Hotel, is scheduled to open in Budapest this summer. Other targeted cities include Bratislava, Warsaw and Zagreb.

"There's still enormous potential out here," Mr. Ott says. "If you give us a few more years, we're going to take all the space we can."