Some two to three decades ago, UCT (the University of Cape Town) and other South African universities came round to accepting that, valuable though they were, civil engineering and quantity surveying qualifications (the traditional means by which ambitious young people qualified for work with development and contracting companies as opposed to joining a design or quantity surveying consultancy) left big gaps in the knowledge that managers in these organizations might need to be completely successful.
As a result, a number of new degree and diploma courses were evolved, all of which have now been in operation for some time and in most cases have met a very real need. Among the most successful have been the BSc Building course and the Technikon Building Management courses.
Perhaps, however, the most valuable of all the courses for a property developer, says Dale Nortje, a Project Manager with Rawson Developers (currently one of the most active of Cape Town’s residential developers) has been the BSc in Property Studies.
“The strong points of the Property Studies degree,” said Nortje recently, “are that it covers the whole spectrum of property development from the initial investigations and feasibility studies through property finance, design, budgeting, scheduling, marketing, law and economics (on a broad scale) to the actual day-to-day management of schemes once work has been initiated.”
“As is often said, by the time a project kicks off, one-third of the work has, in fact, already been completed – or should have been if the developer is to be assured of a viable operation.”
There may, said Nortje, be certain gaps in the Property Studies graduate’s knowledge as regards technical and practical matters, but for these, qualified people can always be found and used. The Property Studies graduate will, however, from the outset find himself involved in coming up with practical solutions to site problems such as, for example, how to deal with massive inflows of underground water and the support of basement side walls before the horizontal deck has been cast – two problems with which he was involved at “The Beaumont” — a 179 unit residential development in Claremont which is currently being constructed by Rawson Developers.
Nortje started with Rawson Developers as a junior project manager, his chief responsibilities on developments like Rivers Edge being the measuring of work done and the checking of cash flows in relation to output. After two years he was given complete control of sites such as “The Beaumont” and “The Acorns” in Stellenbosch.
Among the challenges a person in his position has to accept as particularly important, he said, are keeping the professionals and design staff on schedule with their information flow to the site team and ensuring that the various sections of the site keep to the stipulated schedules.
“It is a cliché to put it this way,” said Nortje, “but the most satisfying aspect of this work is simply that one is creating something and it is usually something that is in great demand. We at Rawson Developers can say with complete satisfaction that in the last few years every one of our projects has proved a good investment for those investing in them and they have also generally been approved of by those who live there because they offer a lifestyle particularly attractive to the young and the young at heart.”
