Kate Heaney never planned to become an executive at one of Australia’s largest commercial real estate services companies. In fact, before she enrolled in the UTS Bachelor of Construction Project Management, she never really planned to become a property professional at all.
“Going through high school, I considered architecture and economics. But my dad said to me, ‘Hey, you should look at a building degree. One, because you’re too bossy for architecture, and two, you’re going to get very bored in economics,’” she says.
This was back in the late 80s, a time when the words ‘women’ and ‘construction’ were pretty unlikely to appear in the same sentence. But Kate was undeterred, enrolling in the UTS construction degree and embarking on what would eventually become a career that now spans 30 years.
At the top of the property industry game
Today, Kate is the Head of Client Care at CBRE, leading the organisation’s strategic client engagement program in the Pacific region. She is also part of CBRE’s Executive Committee and heads up the company’s growth platform, which encompasses services like research, pitch management, sales management and client-facing digital tools.
But she didn’t start at the top. In fact, her first job out of uni was as a site foreman for a company called Concrete Constructions, which her construction industry colleagues had nicknamed the School of Hard Knocks.
“It was just a really aggressive, tough company, but amazing to work for,” she says.
Kate rose quickly through the ranks, from foreman to site manager to project manager within a few short years, despite often being the only woman on site. A lot of the work was familiar – back then, her UTS course had combined classroom learning with a four-year cadetship, which meant she already had a few years of site experience under her belt.
From there, she moved into project management consulting, spent time in London working for a leading investment bank, and completed a Master of Project Management back at UTS. A few years later, she found herself at CBRE.
Paving the way for women in property
Today, she’s working hard to shape the CBRE client experience – but she hasn’t forgotten what it was like to be a woman trying to carve out her place in the vastly male-dominated property sector. To that end, she’s doing her bit to pave the way for the next generation of female property professionals as a mentor and champion for the young women who work alongside her.
“Diversity of thought is so critical in business,” she says.
“I think at the most basic level, women bring different ideas, a different way of looking at things, that’s far more beneficial to good decision making.”
And property offers a lot for women to be excited about – while the industry is yet to achieve gender parity, particularly in areas like construction, there has been what Kate describes as a “quantum leap of change” over the last 30 years.
Not only are female-focused programs and support networks becoming increasingly visible across the sector, but businesses are actively looking for ways to recruit and retain female employees. CBRE is one of them: the company is currently in discussions with UTS to establish an ongoing construction scholarship for female students.
If you ask Kate, the UTS degree is the perfect place for young women to start building the foundations of an exciting, long-lived career.
What I’ve realised is the learnings and the cut and thrust of my degree, because it’s such a diverse degree in terms of subject matter and the people I mixed with, because of the time management required to do a cadetship and a degree at the same time – there’s so many foundational things that came out of it that still inform my work today.
