Hi, I'm Taisho, a penultimate-year Architecture student at the University of Edinburgh. Over the summer, I had the opportunity to intern at Cruden Homes as a Land Intern.
I heard about the Saltire Scholars Programme through a friend, with only a couple of days left before the application deadline. At the time, I was frantically applying to every internship I could find, alongside sending off cold emails left, right and centre. I knew I wanted experience in property development, to gain a broader understanding of the development lifecycle beyond design — but I wasn't yet sure which specific part of that process intrigued me most.
After being accepted into the candidate pool following the assessment centre, it wasn't until I'd started my exchange semester in Madrid that the opportunity to intern at Cruden as a Land Intern came through. The role description excited me straight away, combining my interest in how opportunities are found and deals are made with elements of my university education. That excitement only grew after my interview, when I learned that Andrew, who I'd be working under, had started his own career through a similar internship — so he understood exactly why exposure across the whole development lifecycle mattered.
Walking into Cruden felt quite daunting, as I'd never been in a corporate office setting before, and I'd only moved back from Spain two days prior — a lot of change in a short space of time. Everyone at Cruden met me with a warm smile, though, and I quickly felt at ease. I spent my first few weeks sitting in on meetings and completing tasks both alongside Andrew and independently, which let me see the different stages of the pipeline and how the various departments work together.
I quickly realised the Land team were involved in far more than I'd expected. From the outset, I was reviewing potential acquisition opportunities, drafting legal documents, preparing planning submissions, and carrying out initial viability appraisals. One piece of work I'm particularly proud of was a site opportunity analysis across the Midlothian and Glasgow Local Development Plans, narrowing down applicable sites by unit capacity and then running a thorough planning history check on each. To speed this up, I built an AI agent to scrape eligible sites and their supporting information from council data straight into an existing spreadsheet, which helped me identify 179 eligible sites far more quickly than doing it manually - and gave me the confidence to share my own ideas and contribute suggestions, rather than just follow the process as given.
For the sites that made it through from the Midlothian LDP, I visited each one in person to put together detailed bid briefing documents covering site constraints, competitor analysis, and other key considerations. From there, for the sites that remained live, I reached out directly to landowners to establish whether they were already under contract with another developer or open to acquisition talks. That process gave me a genuine, hands-on understanding of how acquisitions actually happen, and what the Land team looks for when identifying opportunities worth pursuing.
I was struck by the sheer range of variables the team has to weigh up to judge whether a site can create value - being the first stage in the pipeline, it was clear that every decision here carries real weight, as it shapes the overall success of a project. I realised my assumption that opportunistic investment came down to financial analysis alone was wrong - it also demands an understanding of physical constraints and market conditions, and close collaboration with a wide range of external specialists. I loved working at that intersection, pulling together information from many different disciplines to reach a decision on a site's viability.
Coming out of the internship, I have a far deeper understanding of what "property development" actually means once you unpack it, and everything that goes into it. Working alongside people from different backgrounds taught me that it's okay not to have everything figured out on day one, or your future mapped out to the letter. By staying curious and asking questions, new interests emerge and doors you didn't know existed start to open. Thanks to this internship, I've pinned down the part of property development I enjoy most, opportunistic investment and value-add, as I found real satisfaction in contributing to the creation and transformation of assets. It also sparked a broader interest in how businesses themselves work, particularly smaller businesses trying to grow.
If you're on the fence about applying to the Saltire Scholars Programme, my advice is simple: go for it. Stepping into the unknown is one of the most exciting things you can do, there are so many experiences it can lead to, skills you'll gain, and ways it will help you grow as a person. Click apply now, you never know just how far an opportunity like this will take you.
