BUILDING MANAGEMENT: Move will ruin profession
WE refer to the attempt by the Building Management Association of Malaysia (BMAM) to liberalise the property management industry.
The proposal has dire consequences on six public universities or institutions of higher learning which are stakeholders in property management education and profession.
The concerned parties are Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Universiti Malaya (UM), Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM), Tunku Abdul Rahman College (TARC) and Institut Penilaian Negara (Inspen).
BMAM has proposed to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government to set up a Board of Building Managers to allow shopping complex managers, engineers, architects and anyone else to become a professional to manage strata properties. BMAM is also offering courses in building management through a local open university.
Both the proposal and courses offered by BMAM are detrimental to the advancement of higher education in property management and the profession here.
The “education route” that BMAM offers is through the executive MBA in building and facilities management and executive diploma in building and facilities management.
We are aware that there are no full-time staff with the relevant academic and professional qualifications in property or estate management at the said university.
We have doubts about the quality and standards of these programmes, which are new and obtainable in 15 months and where classes run once a week only.
This is in contrast to the full-time degree in property management offered by UTM, degree in real estate management offered by UTHM and degree in estate management offered by UiTM and UM which take up to four years.
Undergraduates have to attend 14 weeks of lectures and tutorials every semester, undergo practical training, sit examinations for six to eight semesters, undertake a final-year research project and take part in co-curriculum activities to develop soft skills.
To ensure the relevance of the course to the industry, the universities have engaged external examiners from the industry, members of professional bodies and foreign visiting professors to provide input into the degree syllabus on a continuous basis.
To obtain international recognition of our local professional degrees, overseas professional bodies, such as the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, have been invited for accreditation and we had obtained such recognition.
Do BMAM courses have such quality assurance measures? Are BMAM courses recognised by any professional bodies? Are the BMAM programmes, which are run on a fast-track, part-time and weekend basis, of comparable quality?
How could executive qualifications be equivalent to a professional degree? It is a shame to make such a claim.
We, associate professors of property management from the four public universities, would like to denounce the credibility of such executive programmes in building management and of any claims that such courses are the equivalent of a professional degree in property or estate management.
The public is advised to check the quality and standard of such courses before enrolment.
The higher education system for property management has evolved since 1967. Today, a prospective student can choose to pursue education in property management at the certificate, diploma, degree, masters and PhD levels at any of the four public universities.
The government has spent millions of ringgit to build up this comprehensive higher education system in property management, which has produced 8,000 trained human capital in the area.
How would BMAM and the proposed Board of Building Managers ensure sufficient number of qualified personnel to meet the demand to manage strata properties?
By recruiting fresh members who are developers, engineers, architects, illegal property managers, complex managers, chargemen, security officers, supervisors of cleaners, uncles and aunts who have completed the fast-track programmes?
On the one hand, BMAM claims building or property management is not a profession and, on the other hand, it wants to set up a Board of Building Managers for regulation of its members.
About 130 full-time lecturers in property management are currently employed in the public universities. With the proposed liberalisation of property management, we lecturers are concerned that our property management graduates will become unemployed in the near future if the profession is liberalised.
The attempt to usurp the power of the Board of Valuers, Appraisers and Estate Agents Malaysia will ruin the property management profession.
We find BMAM’s attempt to claim building management as a separate discipline from property management is misleading the public. The building management of common property entails the same scope of work as property management.
This is a mischievous use of nomenclature to confuse the public. Hence, the proposed Board of Building Managers is overlapping or rather duplicates the functions of the current Board of Valuers, Appraisers and Estate Agents.
We support the proposed registry of property managers by the Board of Valuers, Appraisers and Estate Agents Malaysia, which is the right solution to the issue of property management. On a worldwide basis, professionals who manage real estate are known as property managers and not building managers.
It is a regressive move to call property managers building managers. Such a move is detrimental to the efforts by the ministry to promote Malaysia as a regional higher education hub.
Public universities have been offering property management programmes since 1967 and we have no confidence in the new framework proposed by BMAM. We do not want taxpayer funds to be wasted in reinventing the wheel for property management education by creating a separate building management education system.
What right does BMAM, an organisation established two years ago, has to destroy the higher education framework for property management built from scratch after 45 years of effort and the regulated property management profession which has been in existence for the past 31 years?
We urge the higher education minister to look into the potential issue of unemployed graduates with degrees, diplomas and certificates in property management if the property management industry is deregulated.
- Assoc Prof Dr Ting Kien Hwa,head, Centre for Real Estate Research (CORE), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & SurveyingUniversiti Teknologi Mara, Shah Alam, Selangor
