What real estate education lessons can Mark Zuckerberg possibly offer?
It’s certainly not on how to buy homes below market value considering his own home purchase resulted in him overpaying $1 million. It’s definitely not on how to launch a real estate IPO and whether his dive into commercial real estate with the giant new Menlo Park campus makes a good real estate investing move still has to be seen.
However, no one can deny he does have a ton of intelligence, even if it is in classic, frustrated geek fashion.
Many have scoffed at recent Facebook moves; from email addresses to charging people to message each other or even pay $100 to message him, as well as allowing the recent Instagram debacle and the new anemic looking Graph Search engine rolled out last week.
However, in the near future the joke could be on those who laughed at him.
Few get what Zuckerberg has really been playing at with all of these PR stunts which have been so harshly ridiculed. So perhaps the first real estate education lesson from Mark is the value of being underestimated.
What he is great at is testing. This has all been a series of giant, public tests, even the Instagram ‘mistake’. Harnessing social intelligence and cultivating virtually free market research Facebook has been able to try out numerous new factors of how it really plans to make money, and get the world to wade in and provide free feedback without having to fork out for focus groups or leak what was really in the works.
It is all about selling data and leads. If anyone would have known that Facebook was specifically created to harvest their information, habits, photos and track them far fewer would have signed up. Even marketers have provided the social network with free data on what works and doesn’t on the platform for free. So leverage is a second one. Mark Zuckerberg has leveraged almost 1 trillion people to do his work for him for free.
Of course there is also an important lesson about making connections and networking for real estate investing here too.
So keep your real agenda shielded from the competition, make tons of new connections, cultivate masses of data and use it for targeting, but watch out for changing marketing cycles and perhaps try to make a few less enemies.
