An Examination Of Citizens’ Awareness And Perception Of The Estate Management Profession In Anambra State

Act as Educators and Instructors: Estate Surveyors and Valuers act as teachers and trainers in various capacities either in private practice, public sector or institutions of higher learning where they continuously perform the role of educating people about the nitty-gritty of real estate management as a profession and course of study. They are able to do and achieve this task based on their level of experiences, skills, training and technical know-how in all matters relating to land and landed properties.

Employers of Labour: Estate Surveyors and Valuers who have set up their own private real estate firms are directly performing the role of employers of labour in the society as they create jobs in this regard by employing different kinds of people to work in various departments within their firms.

While performing this important role as employers of labour, Estate Surveyors and Valuers are helping government to curb the issue unemployment which is very rampant in the society through the creation of paid employment opportunities to the citizens that desire to work in real estate and surveying firms.

2.3 CONCEPT OF AWARENESS

The concept of awareness is an important aspect of mans existence as it revolves around our concerns and well informed interest in a particular situation or development. Succinctly put awareness is the ability to directly know and perceive, to feel, or to be cognizant of events or as described by Wikipedia ‘the state of being conscious of something’. The knowledge and understanding that something is happening or exists can be traced to awareness. As humans we make better decisions when we are aware of something, whether it is a slight awareness of what is going on or an acute awareness of subtle differences. The fact is that the majority of our thoughts and actions are on autopilot. Because when we are not even aware of our own habits, routines, impulses and reactions, then we no longer control them they control us.

Every profession or company try as much as possible to raise their brand awareness, from an underwear company to beer companies who raise awareness to make someone walking into a bar asks for Heineken instead of Budweiser. Search engine companies do not only want to give the world information, but to let people be highly aware of the information when they need it. One typically chooses a restaurant to eat at among those with which one has a high awareness of. We keep an address book so we can be aware of a phone number when we need to call that person. A judge tries to determine what circumstances that a legislature was aware of when they passed a certain law

Devanur & Fortnow states that awareness does not occur in a vacuum so they considered two types of inputs. The first is the environment which encodes all information such as a person’s memory, possible interactions with other people and nature, books, the entire internet and everything else one might have access to. The other is a context such as “restaurants in Awka”. How do you decide on what restaurants to eat? A city as Awka typically has a number of restaurants. You would consider restaurants where you have eaten before, recommendations from friends, reviews from newspapers, restaurants guides and search engines, some restaurants you might have walked by or seen an advertisement for. What you don’t do is examine all the restaurants in the city and making the choice that optimizes the various criteria such as type and quality of food, cost, atmosphere and location etc. You simply lack awareness of all restaurants. When measuring the awareness level in the restaurant for instance you would likely choose restaurants’ with high awareness, balanced against your particular desires in food type at the time.

A typical decision making process would go like this: A process starts with an individual who needs to make a decision based on a certain criteria say property management. The individual interacts with the environment, and outputs a decision that satisfies the given criteria. For instance, a criterion could be, finding a professional who has some sort of experience with management of properties. The interaction with the environment would involve going through his contact list hoping to find a friend who has some level of experience in management of property, has their property managed or has any form of information regarding property management. At some point the individual decides to stop the interaction and outputs a decision which could be “adherence to Mr. A’s recommendation of his property manager who may be a lawyer”. Note that this information is plagued with low awareness as they are multiple ways of procuring a professional estate manager whose sole function is the management of properties.

We can use awareness to capture how the decision making process can be manipulated by someone who benefits from the decision made. For example, the friend who was called might want to make sure decision turns out to be his uncle who is a worn out lawyer in need of a job. Awareness also helps us understand the cost of computation which factors into the decision making process. We show how they can be applied in a number of scenarios including sponsored search, competition between brands (focusing on awareness of the brands themselves as well as the awareness of particular attributes that would make the brand look better than the other) and in analyzing user interfaces.