Property

Studying property at CQUniversity can lead to a range of careers in the property industry. Property professionals extend from property managers to people who develop property, to people who manage Shopping Centres to people that manage properties for investment trusts. So there are lots of career pathways and opportunities in studying Property.

With the Property program students start off learning about built form, so they learn about building studies, how houses are constructed and learn about commercial properties and how they’re put together. From there they learn more about the legal aspects of property ownership, they learn more about the financial aspects, they learn about how markets and everything interact, so they develop a really sound understanding of property more than just the built form that we see but also those financial and legal aspects that attach to it. So it sets them up for a pathway and further learning in areas like property management and building studies, property development and other forms of financial planning.

The financial planning major at CQUniversity is a unique offer. We acknowledge that property is incredibly important source of wealth creation, it ties in very well with people’s financial management plans. By students studying financial planning at the same time as  learning about property, they can find the best ways to make property fit into someone’s financial management plan.

All our assessments are authentic, they closely represent what a property professional will be doing out there in the industry. So in order to undertake our offerings and to do our assessments it means that students need to get out there and inspect properties, analyse sales, take photos of properties and engage with industry. In many ways they’re doing the same kind of activities that they will do when they’re out there in the profession.

Our students build their knowledge through the Property course but they also build a portfolio of activities and assessments. Some of those can include things like property valuation reports or models that they’ve developed. These kind of items can fit together as a portfolio to go along and use, if you are going for a job appointment to show people what kind of work that you have done. It can also be used in industry as a tool to analyse sales and real things out there in the marketplace. So we make sure that our assessments are authentic, real and that they can build this portfolio for later use.

We’ve had some great success stories, there is one in particular that sits with me. A particular development entity came to us and they asked for a graduate, they asked for a graduate with high levels of qualification to fulfil an internship role. They were so impressed by one of the students that we sent there, that within a year that student went through the ranks and become a development manager in their own sense. So within a year of completing their university degree that particular student had a team of people underneath them, being the main person involved with developing a large master-planned community up in North Queensland.

For anyone looking to study property I’d encourage them to get involved in the industry, to read the newspapers, find out what’s happening in the marketplace, what’s happening to housing, how these decisions being made. If they find it as a space that is of interest to them then they should look into the study of property. They’ll get to go a lot deeper into this and learn a lot more along that journey.