An insight into the Property Industry
Graduate Jobs in Property and Surveying
My name is Clare Rimmer and i'm a recently qualified surveyor, i work at a company called DTZ. My name is Katie Taylor and i work at Savills and i'm an investment surveyor. My name is Jeremy Payne i'm a Director of DTZ based in our Birmingham office. My name is Zoe Struth, i'm associate director of the development department of Savills land and property limited.
The property industry is vast. It can cover commercial property, residential, rural. It has many, many different aspects to it. Property is about buildings, land, valuing buildings, managing buildings, leasing, buying and selling them. The property industry focuses on buildings both commercial and residential and how they function. That means in terms of on a practical level, how they work as offices or homes but also on a financial liability level as well because obviously they’ve got to be managed and maintained and work for the person who owns them. In the broadest sense we provide advice on land and buildings, their use, the environment around them and their development and how they can be improved. In my mind really the property industry is about maximising the potential of either a site or an actual building.
Some of the things I was looking for were working with people, working outside in the fresh air. I didn’t really want to be stuck behind a desk. The wonderful thing about the property industry is that there is a huge number of specialisms. The obvious divide I suppose is what we call professional and agency. Professional is much more report based, to do with valuation, lease renewals that type of thing whereas the agency side is much more hands on, it’s selling or renting property both commercial or residential. There are a number of different types of surveyor and it basically comes down to what RICS degree you did. If you wanted to specialise in becoming a quantity surveyor you would have to do a degree that was more focused on understanding building costs and building management.
A valuation surveyor will predominantly look at the value of buildings and they have a completely different day to day job and routine to that of an investment agent. An investment agent will be looking at a property in terms of what its market worth is in the market today, what it can achieve in terms of a sales environment. A landlord and tenant surveyor will look at the lease of the building. They will be involved in looking at the relationship between the landlord and the tenant and the contract that they have to occupy that building. A management surveyor however will be looking at how the building day to day is run. Are the tenants happy in terms of their occupational requirements. There is planning as well so if you were interested in how people decide whether a building should go up there or whether ASDA should get their plot down the road, then there are really interesting things about the politics behind planning so you could go and become a planner if that’s what interests you.
I’d worked in valuing retail; I’d worked in the landlord tenant side in terms of looking at how the leases operate, then I worked in the agency team which is where you actually lease out the units and individual properties and that naturally led into investment where you use all of those skill sets together in providing a client with advice. So I came to it very gradually through the 2 year training programme but it was a natural evolution for me to end up working in the team.
I like development because it encompassed a bit of everything so it perhaps gave me the ability to take away the bits I liked from valuation and the bits I liked from agency and put them all together but not have to be involved with the elements which are perhaps more mundane.
You join as a graduate normally although we do take people on as pre-graduates sometimes. You get your RCIS qualification normally within 2 years and you then become a surveyor. For surveyor in some consultancy parts of our firm you become a consultant. You then become a senior surveyor after a couple of years or senior consultant. You then move on after two or three years to become an associate director and two or three more years after that a director.
Most agents start off in the agency world and there is a natural progression to move into fund management at a later date. Some people do it straight from university but most people start their careers in an agency capacity and then move on into fund management.
We are not particularly design oriented in my part of the property industry. You need to go into the architectural side of things if you are interested in anything too arty or design focused.
There are certain firms with certain cultures and I would definitely suggest to anyone thinking of going into surveying that they did a lot of work experience with different firms. The dress code is quite formal for work but that’s because we’re primarily meeting with clients on a regular basis so people are required to be well presented. The atmosphere in the office is probably very relaxed, very fun going environment. I think the culture of surveying is very “work hard, play hard”. We work in an open plan office, it has a bit of a buzz about it, it’s exciting. It is male dominated but there are more girls coming into it so I’d like to say it’s a young mixed group of lots of motivated and ambitious people. And it’s quite a sociable job to do so there are usually two or three pubs that all surveyors will go to and you can literally walk into the pub and you know everyone. So it’s brilliant because you can get to know the whole market.
Provincial cities certainly attract the major firms in our profession. Most of them have offices in most of the major provincial cities around the UK. But that doesn’t mean to say that you have to be successful in our industry just working for big firms in their provincial or London offices.
We have a basic salary and then you have a discretionary bonus system and what that means is it actually allows a very entrepreneurial feel, so are we comparable with other industries, yes, there’s is always the potential to be comparable and if not go a lot further. There’s a lot of scope to earn big bonuses and compete with the investment banking world.
Nowadays the youngsters joining our profession go all over the place, it really is very global and it’s fantastic to hear their experiences and I think I’ve missed that bit so I would like to have done more of that.
What I love about my job is that you can look at sites and you can change them. You can change the use of them. For example, I work in retail and you can change the shopping experience of somebody in a particular shopping centre or retail park. You see an immediate result from it. You can work on a project for a couple of years and you become very entrenched in it and ingrained in it and it becomes part of your life and then you can drive past it a couple of years later and see it completed and built and you think, crikey, I helped deliver that, that was my work, so that’s very rewarding. I suppose for me the worst parts are when you have to write lengthy reports. I suppose that’s the bit I enjoy the least. Phoning up agents, then them not being there and trying to get hold of the right person to give you the right bit of information, searching and trawling websites trying to find properties that you want. I think that’s probably the most boring part of my job.
There are so many different types of surveyor that have completely different skill sets and if you do find yourself in a particular part of the industry that you don’t find that interesting or that stretches you in a way you are uncomfortable with, there is always the opportunity to move into another area.
Lots of people do a masters degree. There is also an undergraduate course for surveying which means you can just do the course in three years rather than studying for a masters and then join a practice after that. Quite often people do a non-property related degree. Your non-cognate degrees are for example the degree that I did, so I had nothing to do with surveying at all. Your cognate degrees are your real estate management etc where you’ve actually chosen that straight off, you’ve gone straight through. More than half of our graduate intake will usually have done a different degree to a property related degree and then taken a masters and come and joined us and sometimes people join us without a property degree at all and without a masters and we do take people who will do a correspondence course or some sort of day-release course to get a masters so there are various coming without necessarily a property related degree. Equally, you can come into the profession without even a degree. There is actually a school-leaver system now where you can go and join a firm which sponsors you to do a night course or whatever and you can get an RCIS qualification that way as well. So we are not totally exclusively graduate degree qualified focused. There are other ways into the profession as well.
Surveying is such a broad industry when you enter it, nobody expects you to know everything. I don’t think anybody out there knows everything but if you show that you’re keen, you’re willing and you’re prepared to work hard that makes applicants stand out. Property is about trading information and the better contacts you have and the more sociable you are really helps. You have to be numeric. There is a certain amount of number work and we have to deliver reports and quite detailed technical documents which have to be written, so there is an English focus there as well. You need to be a quite good all-rounder really. If you’re not an outgoing person, perhaps more valuation type based where you are doing report writing rather than actually negotiating, so for an extrovert, an agency position would be brilliant where you love socialising, you like to go out there and get them, do the deals. If you can demonstrate you’ve got some experience and you understand a bit about the practical side of the profession that counts for an awful lot. I think people who come to apply who have fantastic academic qualifications but have no practical focus at all find it difficult. It’s a very practical world that we work in and it’s all about making things and creating things and it’s all very well having the theory but if you don’t understand the practice it doesn’t work.
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