Teaching

The Department of Expertise in Civil Engineering and Real Estate Appraisal participates in providing courses taught at the institute in the Master’s degree programme of Real Estate Engineering and in the doctoral degree programme, courses on forensic activities and technical expertise in property valuation and construction. In addition to attending theoretical classes, the students have an opportunity to cooperate with real businesses working on practical tasks. The practical part of the studies at BUT involves the following:

• The topics of the students‘ final theses are assigned by experts from practice.
• Experts from practice participate in teaching.
• Representatives of businesses are members of the final state exam committees.
• Excursions and practical training of students in businesses.
• BUT students take part in professional competitions held by businesses.

The degree programme of Real Estate Engineering has been designed as a Master’s degree programme with focus on theory. It aims to provide theoretical and practical interdisciplinary knowledge in construction, economics, environmental studies, and legal regulations (especially in price, civil, and construction law).
The students are also prepared for doing jobs in the professions where the knowledge and skills are most often applied, i.e. real estate business, collateral assessment, other processes in banks and insurance companies, property management, state administration etc

In the doctoral degree programme of Forensic Engineering the department provides courses for students whose dissertation topics are related to property valuation and assessment of defects and failures. The doctoral degree programme aims to prepare the students for research and development activities focused on the investigation of the causes, development and impact of negative technical phenomena in various technical fields and to prepare the students for research and development activities focused on the development of methods based on scientific foundations which are applied when clarifying these negative technical phenomena, in economic assessment of the impact of these phenomena, and in economic assessment of property.

The courses on forensic activities and technical expertise provided by the department are focused primarily on applicants for becoming forensic experts and experts in construction and real estate valuation. They are four-semester courses which take place in the form of one-week workshops approx. four times a year. These courses fulfil the criteria as specialization courses for forensic experts required by instruction No. 8/2017 of the Ministry of Justice in some fields of forensic engineering.

Research and development

The results of the research and development activities done by the staff and students of the doctoral degree programme at the department are presented every year at the below-mentioned international scientific conferences which the Institute of Forensic Engineering helps to organize:

• ExFoS - Expert Forensic Science, an international scientific conference of forensic engineering held annually in January
• JuFoS - Junior Forensic Science, a doctoral conference held annually in April

Forensic engineering activities

Brno University of Technology – Institute of Forensic Engineering is listed as an institution qualified for providing expert opinion reports in Section II of the list administered by the Ministry of Justice (Official Journal ČSR, chapter 5 of 1986) for forensic engineering fields of which the department covers the following:

• Economics – Property prices and valuation;
• Designing;
• Construction –Transport, residential, industrial, water, agricultural structures, various construction branches, civil buildings;

Since 1975, when the institute was established, the department has written hundreds of expert opinion reports, especially in civil and criminal disputes for the courts and police from all over the Czech Republic. Exceptionally, it provides expert opinion in the above-mentioned fields to state organizations and private entities.

The most significant expert opinions provided by the department in the last two years include:

• Papírny Brno s.p. (closing down) factory in Předklášteří – restitution claim.
• Motorway D47 – price of easements.
• A building in Praha - Hodkovičky – damage to the building caused by floods in 2002.
• Valuation of the Industrial Palace in Prague, damage caused by fire.
• Determination of the wear of buildings before a fire on the former premises of the Chropyně sugar factory.
• Determination of the wear of buildings before a fire on the former premises of the Chropyně sugar factory.