This is the transcript for the video Master of Property Development.
Catherine Killen (00:02):
I’m Catherine Killen and I’m the head of school of the UTS School of Built Environment. Welcome to UTS. A degree from the UTS School of Built Environment will enable you to have a rewarding career and make a positive impact on society. Our courses prepare you for careers in planning, property development, property, investment, project management and construction. Our courses are internationally accredited. They’re taught by experts with experience and industry connections. We are here to answer your questions about studying at UTS, and we hope to see you here.
Paul Van der Kallen (00:41):
Hi everybody it’s Paul Van der Kallen doing the postgraduate Q&A tonight. I would just like to commence our webinar with an acknowledgement to country. I’d like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, upon whose ancestral lands our city campus now stands. I would also like to pay respect to the elders both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this land. We’re here tonight looking at the master of property development course, which is the course most people know the property development suite of courses for. However, we also have a graduate diploma in property development, and a graduate certificate in property development. Now these three courses are basically embedded within each other. The graduate certificate is in effect the first four subjects of the graduate diploma, which is in effect the first eight subjects of the master of property development.
Paul Van der Kallen (01:44):
There’s basically three entry points into this suite of courses. To some degree, it really doesn’t matter that much as to which course you initially enroll in. If you enroll directly in the master of property development, then there’s no need to lodge subsequent applications and so forth. However, in terms of course completing there’s not a huge difference between starting from the graduate certificate and articulating through to the master of property development, or enrolling directly in the graduate diploma or master of property development. Typically, people who take our courses come from a property to some extent property related background. Now that may be quite a specific property related vocation, such as property valuer or property manager or architect or a town planner. Often we have people coming through who’ve done law that work in the property area primarily, also a lot of people from government and not-for-profit organizations that deal in housing or development.
Paul Van der Kallen (03:04):
You can see the typical person that comes into our course generally has an undergraduate degree or substantial industry experience in a property related area. What I generally do at this stage of the information session is just to have a look at how the master of property development course seems to work for most of our students. Typically, when we think of the property development industry, it encompasses many areas of professional expertise. We find typically people come into our course they’ve got a construction background or an architect background, or town planning, or a number of other legal accounting. What they’re doing is they’re in through their original qualification and role, they’ve had a large exposure to property and then to the property development industry.
Paul Van der Kallen (04:11):
They see that they get to a point where to move forward they really need to have a better understanding of the other silos of knowledge that all feed into the property development process. You can see this is from an employer who has employed a number of our students that are graduates at UTS, and this is their sort of HR map if you like. You can see that they look at where they’re recruiting their staff from, we’ve got design and technical services. You’d be looking at your architects and so forth, the people involved with that. They might come in, in terms of the delivery of projects or the upfront design. We’ve then got our development people. That would generally be more likely to have a real estatey sort of background. They’d be looking for finding the sites, putting the deals together, negotiating and marketing and so forth.
Paul Van der Kallen (05:15):
Then we’ve got our construction, which would be the engineering, the contract administrators, construction onsite manager, people managing external contractors and so forth. These people within their own original area of knowledge, they get to a point where they say I’ve become the construction manager, but really I’d like to be the development manager. I’d like to move a little bit higher up through the hierarchy, and obtain a more senior role in the organization. To do that, they need to actually understand the other silos of knowledge which all feed into the property development process and industry. What our course does is it enables people to get a fairly sound understanding of the additional areas of knowledge that you need to be able to take a top-down view of an organization, and to manage the various silos or professional advice and so forth that feeds into the higher levels of the organization.
Paul Van der Kallen (06:34):
Basically, I think we might just stop there for a second if there’s any questions. I do have one here just in relation to whether the course will be available online in the short-term. As you’re probably aware this year due to the COVID-19 pretty much all of the university subjects have gone to an online format. It’s very likely that that will remain for this year. We suspect that in the long-term there’ll be a move towards a more blended approach, with probably more subjects being offered online than have been traditionally. But presently I can’t answer that in an absolute fashion, although it is likely for the rest of this year. I think next year it’s likely that there’s probably going to be quite a few more subjects offered as an online rather than face-to-face.
Paul Van der Kallen (07:29):
I’ve just got a question about the scheduling and timetabling, and I’ve got a section on that a little bit later in the presentation. If I could leave it till then, and if you have any following questions, then by all means we’ll lead to them after that. There is one question that I will address right now though, is in terms of enrolling full-time or part-time. Basically when you enroll in our courses in the postgraduate area of the build environment, whether you enroll as a part-time student or a full-time student, in effect doesn’t really make much difference to your options in terms of how many subjects you do. The key difference that it makes is that once you tick the box on the application form, the enrollment form to say you’re part-time, the university systems will track your progress in accordance with a part-time typical progress, which is about four subjects a year.
Paul Van der Kallen (08:27):
Now what happens is if you enrolled part-time and only were doing two subjects a year, you’ll get some letters from the university, asking you to talk to the course director about the pace at which you’re learning and so forth. If you were full-time and then you decided to switch to part-time, and so the university systems would be tracking you at eight subjects a year. However, you’re only doing four, so then you’ll get some letters. Sometimes they might even sound a little bit threatening, but basically just wondering what your problem is and so forth. It’s really a tracking thing. Once you’re enrolled, you can basically enroll in as many subjects as you like, and just about as few subjects as you like.
Paul Van der Kallen (09:12):
There is a timeframe where the university allows you to course complete. For full-time people that would be 18 months for the masters course, and three years for if you were part-time. Nevertheless, we’re reasonably flexible in terms of extending our students that are largely adults with demanding jobs and children and partners and all the rest of it. Things come up in your life and sometimes studies got to go in the back burner for a little while. That’s very common, and we’re very used to dealing with those situations and trying to accommodate the students. In terms of the specific, there’s a question about which courses and so forth. I’ll just leave that for the moment, but we’ll come back to that a bit later. Just to come back to our core structures.
Paul Van der Kallen (10:21):
We have the graduate certificate in property development, the graduate diploma in property development and the master of property development. The courses are basically nested courses, and the graduate certificate is in fact the first four subjects of the masters and also of the graduate diploma. Irrespective of which course you enrolled in, you would take those four subjects in your first semester if you’re full-time, or in your first year if you are part-time. You’ll notice there’s no electives in there they’re all core subjects and you need to do all four. Now those subjects are also a prerequisite subjects for a number of other subjects in the course, and hence they’re also the first four subjects that we do. Following from the graduate certificate, you could reapply for the graduate diploma or if you were in the masters or the graduate diploma you would just roll on through to the next series of subjects.
Paul Van der Kallen (11:23):
The next two subjects that you would take being the two more core subjects which are involved with the graduate diploma. The graduate diploma is those four subjects plus these two core subjects, sustainable urban development and group project A:urban renewal. Then to complete the graduate diploma, you would also select two elective subjects. Moving on from the graduate diploma, you could again either just apply for entry into the masters or articulated to the masters of property development course, or you may have already enrolled directly in the masters. Your next two core subjects would be property market and risk analysis, and property development finance, and you would do two more electives. The four electives here incorporates the two that you would have done in the graduate diploma, and you would take two more subjects.
Paul Van der Kallen (12:19):
I’m just having a quick look at the questions that are here and I’ll come back to those shortly. Looking at our electives, and this is not the totality of all the elective subjects that we have, but in the School of Built Environment we have a postgraduate degrees in property development, property investment, planning, construction and project management. Our elective choices within the school are very broad, and they come from those areas which go across our schools. You may decide that, and this is really going back to that original career path diagram. Different students that come into the course are looking to obtain specialist areas in the gaps that they have within their knowledge fields. If I was a construction person I would be thinking, “Look, I need to know more about the valuation side of things. I need to understand planning. I need to understand finance.”
Paul Van der Kallen (13:49):
You’d be looking to grab those bits of knowledge to build within your degree, so that you pick up the fields of knowledge that you feel you need to move ahead often within your organization, or to just generally move your career forward. In terms of how that fits together for people, it’s a very individual thing, and hence we have our core structures, core subjects, and then we have quite a range of electives so that we can be as flexible as possible with the students in terms of them obtaining the knowledge that they feel they need to move through their career. The subjects that are offered here, if we look at these, these all come from that’s a property development subject, property development. There’s a new graduate certificate and graduate diploma in construction management. Those three subjects come from the construction management course.
Paul Van der Kallen (14:58):
This subject design by property development it’s offered across a range of courses. This subject global property trends probably not running this year, but essentially that’s a subject where students do a two week international tour of three cities, and look at major projects in those cities and then have a boardroom presentation from the key staff that conceived the project and delivered the project. That’s been very popular with our students over the last number of years. In the past, it’s been to Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo and Seoul. There’s six cities, the whole subject actually goes for a month, but the tour goes for a month. However, in terms of the course completion requirements, you only need to attend three cities, and that would be over about a period of about two weeks. That’s one of the ones people will actually seem to will be very popular.
Paul Van der Kallen (16:06):
You can pack it in if you’re at work, you can pack that in with a holiday if you like, and you can also package that with saying, “Look, I’ll go to a city for the two weeks and then I’ll have two more weeks in wherever it is.” Or you can package it around with a bit of a break for yourself at the same time, or do week one and week three and have a week off in the middle, etcetera. It’s quite flexible that way. We’ve got a subject in aged housing, retirement housing and aged care. That’s a new it’s an evolving area that’s in the property market. Real estate economics comes from our master of real estate investment course. These subjects capital markets, financial management, they come from the MBA. Again, you can select your electives from the MBA, those would be credited to you if you subsequently did a MBA.
Paul Van der Kallen (16:58):
Again, hinging on what are these that you’re after, these subjects are all from the master of planning degree. Again, by selecting if let’s say for example I took four subjects from the master of planning as my electives, on completion of the master of property development I could then, if I wanted, apply for the master of planning degree, and I would be granted those subjects as subject credits, along with probably another four subjects from the master of real estate development. You would in fact have eight subjects out of 12 completed already. You’d get up to two thirds of the course as a subject credit. Similarly, with project management these subjects come from our master of project management course. Again, if project management was a focus that you felt you would like to develop, then you could take some or all of your four electives from the master of project management course.
Paul Van der Kallen (18:08):
On completion of the master of property development, you would be credited the subjects which were in the project management course, and perhaps a few of the property subjects may be taken as electives in the project management course as well. You might get six or so subject credits. This structure of subjects being counted or credited towards a subsequent degree, runs right through our postgraduate field of subjects and knowledge areas at UTS within our faculty. Many people do a subsequent degree once they’ve completed their first one, and so it goes. All right, so I’ll just take a minute to answer a few questions, sorry. I’ll just run through those. With the timetabling I’ll leave those timetabling questions for the moment. Answer a few of those. We offer some dual degrees.
Paul Van der Kallen (19:34):
I’ve got a question there from someone concerning is it better to do project management course and the development management course, if your end goal is to become a development manager? It’s an interesting dilemma. Project management, so it really depends on where you are at the moment and where you see yourself going to. There’s so much knowledge involved with just property development or just planning, that I would generally say if you considered that your goal was to be a property developer, then you would probably be best to continue in or to take the property development course. Maybe take one elective from the project management course, and then see how you feel about the trade-off between the alternative electives that you could have taken in the property development course, versus taking further electives from the project management course.
Paul Van der Kallen (20:43):
These are similarly with town planning for example or investment, quite simply there’s so many fields of knowledge that we do need to come back to focus on or think about. Where it is we want to end up? What do we already have? What knowledge do we already have behind us? Do we need to build on that as well, or do we need to learn from new fields of knowledge? Those decisions are something that we can’t provide a general answer for. It comes down to the individual circumstances of a person and the opportunities that lay in front of them. In terms of Commonwealth supported places, presently in postgraduate study we don’t have Commonwealth funded supported places. I believe there is some talk of that with the federal government at the moment, but I haven’t seen anything so far about it.
Paul Van der Kallen (21:57):
There is a fee help arrangement and our student center will be able to advise you on that. But you can have the government loan scheme involved with the fees for the course, but they’re not supported places like they might be in an undergraduate degree. I think we’ll leave that for the moment and come back to the presentation. Timetabling. What you can see here is our timetable for, well this is for last year, for this year it’s very similar, and for next year it will also be quite similar to this. In effect in our postgraduate area, we don’t run two teaching sessions a year, we run multiple sessions a year. The design of this is orientated particularly for our part-time students, who quite often have quite demanding jobs and so forth. It’s difficult for them to do a lot of subjects at once, and work and to do all the other family things that they’re involved in.
Paul Van der Kallen (23:22):
Basically we try to set out the course up so that there are multiple teaching periods per year. In these cases, so for 2018, 2019, 2020, they’ve been approximately eight week sessions. Now, bear in mind presently we can only enroll in a course from autumn or spring. That’s when we can apply and gain entry. Once we’ve applied and once we have entry into the course, we can then take subjects as they come. My point being is it’s not possible to enroll in May. You can’t do that. You can only enter a course in autumn or spring, but once you’ve entered the course, then you’re able to take the subjects in whichever period they may be falling into. The idea with this is that if people are studying full-time you do two subjects. This is our graduate certificate, two subjects in eight weeks, and then two subjects in the following eight weeks.
Paul Van der Kallen (24:37):
For our part-time people, we would take one subject there, one subject in May, then we would take one subject in spring and one subject in October. We’re only ever doing one subject at a time. Combined with the way these subjects are traditionally delivered, which is in block mode, it’s not always 100% the case, but largely the way the subjects are programmed is that it would generally involve possibly a Thursday night, all day Friday and all day Saturday. Then you would have a break for about four weeks, and then you would come back and do a Thursday night, all day Friday, all day Saturday again, and that would be the completion of the face-to-face. In effect, you can do the subjects or by and large you could do these subjects by only needing to take one Friday a month off work. That’s been the way the program’s been. Doesn’t work for all subjects but it’s the way the property development program has been structured in general.
Paul Van der Kallen (25:44):
The other thing is that we run all our core subjects twice per annum. You can see property development processes in autumn, it’s also in spring. Property transactions autumn and spring and so on. The core subjects, which are those four, additionally those two for the graduate diploma, and additionally those two for the master of property development, they all run twice a year. The other thing that’s worked with this program well for people is that let’s say work sent me overseas for May, or some event or people would get married or whatever happens, so I can’t do a subject in May. I can still do autumn, I can still do one subject in autumn. That’ll be over and done with after about eight weeks, and so I can take that period off and still continue to study throughout the year.
Paul Van der Kallen (26:41):
This has worked quite well for people, in that study gets too much or work gets too busy, you need to have a stop, so you can stop for a short period without having to wait for a half a year before you can re-enroll to take the next subject. That is a feature often in courses where the subjects are all a full autumn subject or a full spring subject, that if you need to either do the subject or not do the subject. If you miss autumn then you’ve got to wait till spring, or if you miss spring you’ve got to wait till the following autumn. There’s quite a bit of flexibility built into the timetable, and that seems to work quite well for our students who work full-time. You will notice so going back our core subjects we run twice per annum, and then we have a whole list of electives.
Paul Van der Kallen (27:36):
When you look at these subjects and this is not all of them, but this is pretty much most of them, they’re broken into groups. These three subjects come from the postgraduate construction degrees. These ones are from the property development course. These ones are from planning. These ones are from the MBA, and that’s a different faculty that’s the business school. Then these ones are from the project management course. They’re all the electives, or they’re a large number of electives that are available to you within the school. But many of the electives are only offered once per annum. The core subjects are twice the electives largely once per annum. If you were moving through the course, you could say, “Look, I really want to do this construction cost planning subject. Maybe I’ll defer that core subject till spring and take the construction planning subject because that would be very useful knowledge for me right now.”
Paul Van der Kallen (28:51):
You have that flexibility, and it’s a good idea to have a look at the areas of knowledge that you feel that you really need and the more urgently you need them, then have a look at the electives and then design your program for the year around how soon you need various bits of knowledge, and if they’d be useful to you. You could push a core subject back a little bit. We also have teaching periods in July and we have them here you can see them in February. We have some this year which will be in November. The issue with those of course is that you need to be enrolled in the course before you can do them. If you’re looking at saying, “Look, I don’t really want to start till the end of the year, but there’s a subject on in November,” then you would still be best to enroll for the spring semester, and simply don’t do a subject until November.
Paul Van der Kallen (29:50):
You need to be enrolled in the course is my point to be able to access those subjects which are outside of autumn and spring teaching periods. That’s something to consider. Okay I’m just move on from there, so entry requirements. Our course entry requirements for the master of property development, applicants must have one of the following, a UTS recognized bachelor’s degree or equivalent. Now we need to have a credit average pass, and it needs to come from what we call a cognate knowledge area. This is an area related to property. Now, specifically, and we don’t control this is controlled by the federal government, but a cognate fields are architecture, building, engineering, management commerce, law, economics or econometrics. We need a undergraduate degree with a credit average, or completed the graduate diploma in property development with a credit average, or completed a UTS graduate diploma in construction management with a credit average. They’re the entry requirements for the master of property development.
Paul Van der Kallen (31:04):
You can see they involve an underpinning qualification at AQF level seven or eight, which is degrees and graduate diplomas and with a credit average pass. The graduate diploma in property development. This is where most of our students seem to enter the course these days. For entry into the graduate diploma, we simply need an undergraduate degree recognized by the university of technology. The degree can be from any field. We’ve actually had people who’ve completed PhDs who were in science. They still had to come in through the graduate diploma entry point, because they’re simply the framework, the federal government framework around this says they can’t have direct entry into a masters, because it’s not a cognate undergraduate or cognate qualification.
Paul Van der Kallen (32:04):
Basically people come in with any undergraduate degree, it doesn’t necessarily need to be at a credit average, and further of course any of the graduate certificates in that we offer property and planning, property development, planning, construction management, project management. With a credit average that will get you into the graduate diploma of property development. Finally, we’ve got the graduate certificate. Now, the graduate certificate again UTS recognized bachelor’s degree or equivalent, an advanced diploma in the field of the built environment. However, we also will consider applicants who have industry experience and not necessarily an undergraduate degree or advanced diploma in the field of the built environment. This is also where a number of people come into our programs, and basically that’s a merit basis application, CV clearly articulate your work experience and a personal statement.
Paul Van der Kallen (33:06):
You lodge your application with those supporting documents and it’s considered and then we come back to you from there. They’re the three entry points, the graduate certificate basically work experience or qualification. A graduate diploma needs to be a graduate certificate or any undergraduate degree. The masters very specific undergraduate degree with a credit average pass. I have some weblinks there. I’ll just click this one for you. You may have seen this, but I’ll click to that, which just takes you to the postgraduate courses offered within our school. You can see we’ve got masters of project management, property development, the dual degree courses, and then the graduate diplomas and graduate certificates. If you haven’t seen this page by clicking on this page, as an example it will take you through what’s involved with the course, what the subjects are.
Paul Van der Kallen (34:18):
If you click on a subject, it will give you a snapshot of the subject what’s involved in it and so forth. We’ve got that one. Recently, sorry, it’ll come back to that. Excuse me for a second here. UTS now has direct application. In the past, people had to go through UEC to apply, but now there’s an online direct application. The marketing team I’m sure will provide you with that weblink where you can simply apply directly online. I think there’s no charge involved with that. Previously I think UEC fee was about $100 for an application. This is a free application and you can do it online. I’ll come back to any questions people might have, and I’ll just have a look at our Q&A. There’s a question here, how frequently would you need to come to Sydney? That’s going to vary. At the moment you probably don’t have to come at all, but hinging on which subjects you’re doing, but there’s very few subjects which require face-to-face attendance for this year.
Paul Van der Kallen (36:01):
Chances are for this year probably there’s a very good chance you wouldn’t have to come up to Sydney at all if you were taking subjects in spring this year. Next year I’m not 100% so I do think there’ll be quite a few subjects which will be offered as online purely online, but we’ve had many people in the past. I guess if you’re a part-time student taking the course in the traditional delivery mode you would have to come up for one weekend a month. It will be a Thursday night till you’ll be here for Friday and Saturday face-to-face classes monthly. However, I don’t think that’s going to be the case in the future, I think it will be less than that. You need to attend typically there’s two blocks for each subject, and the blocks are generally a Friday and Saturday. Four subjects a year, you’d be doing that eight times a year. Completing the course job opportunities. As you probably noticed the property market’s in a bit of a pickle at the moment.
Paul Van der Kallen (37:12):
Nevertheless, the under supply of particularly residential property in Sydney and Melbourne at least is really substantial. At the moment we’ve probably got this COVID has thrown a spanner in the works with the property market, and no one really knows where it’s going to end up in the short-term. In the medium to long-term it looks pretty good. In terms of employment opportunities, presently I think if you’re not already in the industry then it’s probably going to be a bit tough to get into the industry in the immediate future, until the issues surrounding COVID and people working and so forth wash out. I would think the next year or so is going to be pretty slow. Following that it’s probably a slow build back up again, but who knows? We don’t really know. It has been very good for a very long period of time. But presently it’s pretty hard to make a call exactly on where the market will be in 12 months’ time.
Paul Van der Kallen (38:33):
I’ve got a question about… Just to reiterate the point I made earlier, if you enroll at one of our courses, whether you enroll full-time or part-time, you can enroll as many subjects as you like. Typically, a full-time person would take four subjects per half year. We’ve actually programmed our courses so that there’s subjects on offer over the summer, and also in the July period. You can go faster than eight subjects a year if you want to. As long as you’re happy with the subjects that are available in those fringe study periods being over the Christmas period or January, December, January and July you’re able to take more than eight subjects a year. Again, you could take it’s really up to yourself and looking at the timetable to see how many subjects you can do. People wanting to be a property developer running your own property development company, our master of property development course.
Paul Van der Kallen (39:46):
Once you start moving through the course, once you’ve done a few core subjects, you’ll soon realize the bits of knowledge that you need to add to your existing knowledge to be able to run your own property development company. Some of these questions once you start in the course, once you do the first few subjects, you’ll start to say oh dear, I need to know more about this or that than I thought, [inaudible 00:40:08] that I need to understand about whatever it is planning or so forth. It depends on your own existing knowledge. But you will find these things start to become clearer, and as students move through the course, they often say, “I didn’t realize there was so much to know about planning, so I’m going to take more of those subjects or do a subsequent degree in planning as well, because I really see how important that is to be able to put developments together.”
Paul Van der Kallen (40:42):
Develop managers at the moment I think it’s just to send a call, but I think that the industry has probably slowed down a fair bit, and I think it’s going to stay that way for probably a while. The development market guys on and off. In terms of the demand for property development managers, normally there’s quite a long run where the market’s quite good. When the market turns down, it can be down for a few years. It’s just the nature of property cycles. If we enter the property market at the… If we’re entering the market right now, and we’re hoping to get a development management role without any experience, that would be probably a pretty tough call. If you’re already a construction manager or an engineer, not so. But if you’re coming in from no property background at all, it would be pretty tough to land a job as a development manager right now. Down the track, it might be a bit different, you’ll be an assistant development manager probably.
Paul Van der Kallen (41:50):
Group projects, yes there is, but they’re being done virtually. There’s some questions about group projects. Yes, there are group projects, but they’re not in all subjects. Many subjects don’t have the group projects at all. Yes, there is a feasibility analysis tool, and there’s a subject dedicated to development feasibilities, and you’ll be looking at that software and basically also using Excel and other tools to do enough feasibility studies. Once you enroll in the course, then you can have a chat to the course director about where you want to go I guess in the course, which subjects you might do. You will find once you start doing the core subjects it’ll fill you in, in terms of what you should do. In terms of the other industry questions, a valuation degree, there is an approval with the Australian Property Institute [inaudible 00:43:04] hinging on the range of electives that you’ve selected, that the master of property development graduates are eligible for certified practicing valuer.
Paul Van der Kallen (43:16):
However, it hinges on the elective subjects that you’ve taken through the course of the degree. That’s something you should have a look at when you’re selecting your electives particularly. The fees for the course. I think approximately I’m a little bit out of touch with this, but I think it’s approximately three and a half thousand dollars a subject, but certainly the marketing and student center will be able to help you with that. Internships, not really in the postgraduate area, we tend not to have internships. We have employers chasing students. We have quite a bit of that. Where employers are saying, “Do you have anyone with a construction background doing your course and so forth?” We do get direct employer inquiries. However, we don’t tend to get internships involved with the postgraduate degrees. They tend to be orientated towards the undergraduate degrees.
Paul Van der Kallen (44:19):
Just the nature of people doing the postgraduate courses tend to already have a bit of a career, and largely they’ve already got a working some way. That’s typically the way it washes out with those internships. Unfortunately I have a class that starts in seven minutes, so I’m going to have to end the webinar here. However, our marketing people will be happy to take any further questions from you, and we’ll get back to you. If they’re unable to answer them, we’ll come back and answer those questions for you probably by mail the next day or so. Thanks very much, and I hope this has helped you in your decision to whether or not you may apply for the property development suite of courses at UTS. Thanks again.
Luke Chess (45:23):
Thanks Paul, there’s just one quick question there regarding opting for two masters, if it’s possible that you can answer that before you go very briefly, that would be appreciated. Then you’ve got Luke and Amanda here from marketing who can answer any further questions.
Paul Van der Kallen (45:38):
Fantastic, thanks. We’ve got a range of dual degrees. There’s dual degrees with the property development and real estate investment with planning, property development and master of planning, and property development and project management. The trade-off doing a dual degree is basically when you do a dual degree by and large you’re taking the core subjects out of each of those degrees. You’re doing 16 subjects instead of 12. If you looked at our program earlier we have eight core subjects and four elective. Basically you’re taking the eight core subjects out of each degree. That’s very useful. However, the trade-off with that is that you’re not doing the electives, so you’re getting the dual degree, but you’re not necessarily picking up well, it hinges on what you already know and what you feel you need to know.
Paul Van der Kallen (46:34):
Doing a dual degree may not necessarily make you more marketable in the industry. If you want to go in property and you think I’ll do a dual degree because I’ll look better on paper, well possibly, but I would say probably you’re better to take those elective subjects from the property development area, or if you are in project management from the project management area or the planning area if you’re in planning. Because the elective subject content is very important if you’re in that field. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword I guess. One side it’s a really good thing because you’ve got the dual degree or the combined degree I think they call it now. But the other side is that you’re trading off by not taking the electives that might be very useful to you soon as you start work. That’s the way I see the dual degrees.
Paul Van der Kallen (47:36):
They do change things for international students in terms of visas and [inaudible 00:47:43]. There’s a somewhat of an agenda there with the dual degrees that it ties in with subsequent I think it’s not permanent residency, but there’s another form of residency between student visa and permanent residency, and I think it ties in with that. For international students it’s pragmatic to do a dual degree. In terms of accreditations for the dual degrees, again it comes down to the individual professional bodies that accredit out courses. As an example, the Australian Property Institute accredits the master of property development for a number of things, but if you want to be a valuer then you have to have very selective electives. If you did a dual degree you wouldn’t have taken those electives and therefore you wouldn’t meet their requirements to be accredited or recognized as meeting the valuation educational requirements.
Paul Van der Kallen (48:43):
You would have to subsequently come back and enroll in something else, another degree to pick up those additional subjects you’ve missed out on, to then say, “Look, I’ve completed that degree, and then I’ve also done these other subjects, and now I’m eligible for this CPV.” It’s a matter of where you’re end picture is I guess, as to whether a dual degree is a good idea, or whether it’s better to just take a single masters degree. If you do a masters degree, you can always simply carry those forward as subject credits into a subsequent degree, or you can carry many of the subjects into a subsequent degree as subject credits, if those subjects are across both courses.
Paul Van der Kallen (49:26):
The university rule there is 66%, so two thirds of if I did a course with 12 subjects I could credit eight subjects into a subsequent degree. If those subjects were available in both degrees, I could carry eight across and then I could do a second degree by taking four more subjects. That works a little bit differently, hinging on which masters course you’re looking at, or which graduate diploma, but it’s up to two thirds, so hinges on the subject selections in each course. Luke I think I’m going to have to go now.
Luke Chess (50:06):
Absolutely Paul, thank you. I was expecting a quick answer and you gave us a long one, so thank you very much. Folks, thank you for your time and thank you to Paul for his time outlining the master of property development. If there are any further questions that we’re unable to address right now, my colleague Amanda has actually shared the general email address in the chat channel there, it’s dab.communication@uts.edu.au. If you open up the chat channel there you’ll see Amanda’s post, it’s the third last post. We’re happy to take questions from there at any time. We’re also happy to take further questions now, although Paul is our course content expert, so it’s quite likely if you’re talking to Amanda and myself, that while we can give you general information, we’ll need to get back to you for specific course information. If there are any further questions do ask them now, otherwise enjoy your evening and we’ll look forward hopefully to seeing you on the ETPs.