Highly desirable: university offers first estate agent degree

UNDERGRADUATES can now pay £9,250 a year to learn how to measure a room in the country’s first-ever university degree for estate agents.

The Royal Agricultural University has said it plans to offer a two-year foundation course from September, which it claims will be the UK’S “first-ever” estate agency degree. Those enrolled on the course will spend two years learning how to sell and let homes – with modules including “surveying, inspection and measurement”.

Other modules on the course, which costs UK students £9,250 a year in tuition fees, or £15,000 for international students, also include “land and property economics”, “principles of marketing” and “business informatics”.

The teaching sessions, “inspired by the humanist approach”, according to the course syllabus, will take place in Swindon. They are timetabled for two days of the week – Mondays and Tuesdays – covering 28 weeks of each year.

The course includes a 10-week work experience placement, though prospective students have been told they will need to source these themselves.

Entry requirements state students must have passed at least one A2 Level and have obtained five GCSES at grade C or higher. The Royal Agricultural University’s course is the latest in a string of vocational degrees now taught at British universities.

At Bath Spa, students can study how to be circus-theatre performers, while at the University of Plymouth they can study the science of surfing. At the University of Exeter, students have the opportunity to do a master’s in magic.

It comes as rising tuition fees – which must now be repaid over 40 years – and the larger proportion of school leavers going on to obtain a degree have called into question whether the value of a university education is in decline.

In the 1990s, Sir Tony Blair, then prime minister, set out to put half of all young adults through higher education – a target that was finally reached in 2019. Along the way, tuition fees were raised in 2010 from £3,225 a year to £9,000, and again to £9,250 in 2017.

Despite these rises, tuition fees – which are frozen – left universities and colleges £2,500 out of pocket for every home student last year, according to the Russell Group, which has raised concerns over the sustainability of the latest funding model.

Now Labour is pushing for more estate agents to have higher education qualifications in an effort to rid the housing market of “cowboys”.

Last month, Matthew Pennycook, Labour’s shadow housing minister, tabled an amendment to incoming housing reforms that would require all estate agents to have at least one A-level and all directors of estate agencies to have an undergraduate degree.

Propertymark, the estate agency trade body, has long been calling for “a properly regulated industry”, acknowledging that entry requirements for the profession are already higher in Scotland and Wales than they are in England.

Other countries have even stricter requirements. In Sweden, for example, all estate agents have to have a two-year university qualification.

‘Those enrolled on the course will spend two years learning how to sell and let homes’