Commercial awareness in real estate courses
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how and to what extent commercial awareness is embedded within the curriculum of the UK Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS)-accredited real estate courses. It also discusses the development of commercial awareness taxonomy.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper presents the research findings of questionnaire survey and interviews with RICS-accredited real estate course providers in the UK. The questionnaire aimed to gather course directors’ views on the definitions and components of commercial awareness and identify what skills and attributes are required for its development. It also evaluated how commercial awareness has been embedded in the real estate courses. The aim of the interview was to gain deeper insight on how components of commercial awareness are embedded in real estate courses and nine interviews were conducted. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and coded to identify similar themes. The frequency of the answer in the questionnaire and comments from interviewees is presented.
Findings
The UK real estate academics agreed the most important definition of commercial awareness as that of a “person's ability on understanding of the economics of business”. They agreed that “strategic” is the most important component for commercial awareness, followed with “financial” and “process”. However, the “financial” component is embedded the most in the curriculum. The most important skill and attribute for commercial awareness development are “ability to define and solve problems” and “ability and willingness to update professional knowledge”, respectively. Commercial awareness was embedded in the overall curriculum and the key element for developing it is through having “practical experience”.
Originality/value
This project is the first to conduct an in-depth analysis of commercial awareness in real estate education. It also develops the pioneer commercial awareness taxonomy.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Research Trust's funding for this project. The author would also like to express sincere gratitude to Dr Richard Stevens for his research assistance, and Paul Royston, Nottingham Trent University, for his input on the initial development of the research idea. Finally, the author would also like to thank the academics who completed the questionnaires and the academics who agreed to be interviewed.
Citation
Poon, J. (2014), "Commercial awareness in real estate courses", Property Management, Vol. 32 No. 1, pp. 48-66. https://doi.org/10.1108/PM-01-2013-0007
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2014, Emerald Group Publishing Limited