RMIT University’s School of Property, Construction and Project Management is conducting a research study to better understand the current level of diversity and equality in the Australian valuation industry and what can be done to further improve them. We are particularly interested in the experiences and perceptions of female valuers, executives of valuation companies, executives of professional associations, valuation educators and property students. The project is funded by the Australian Property Institute. 

As part of the data collection, we are holding two focus group discussions with the following groups.   

  1. Focus group 1 – Female property valuers 
  1. Focus group 2 – Executives of property valuation companies  

We are very interested in hearing your views on this timely issue and would like to invite you to participate in one or both of the above focus group discussions. Focus group discussions will be held in early August 2022 and will take about 1 – 1.5 hours. To make it convenient for the participants, we will hold focus groups discussions online during the lunch break starting at 12.00 noon.  

We guarantee that your responses will remain strictly confidential and will only be used as part of the group of responses. As you will be given a code number only, no-one will be able to identify you or your organisation from any of the recorded data. No one will have access to focus group discussion information other than the researchers, so the confidentiality will always be preserved. It will not be possible to identify you or your organisation in any manner in any publication.  

We hope you will be interested in participating in one or both of these focus group discussions. If so, please contact the principal researcher Dr Dulani Halvitigala via email [email protected] and we will send you further information about the project and how we would conduct the focus groups. We thank you in advance for your support for this research project and look forward to hearing from you.  

Yours sincerely,  

Dr Dulani Halvitigala, Dr Judith Callanan and Dr Rebecca Leshinsky  

School of Property, Construction and Project Management 

RMIT University 

E: [email protected]