This is my #10 eBook on Self-made Billionaires. My biggest challenge is the sheer number of real estate Self-made Billionaires (SMB). There are well over 100 of them in the world. If I include all of them, the book will be too huge and too boring for most readers. So I resort to 4 cut-off criteria to trim the number of well over 100 to a manageable 65. The 4 cut-off criteria are (1) for Hong Kong the cut-off net worth is $4B , (2) for US, the cut-off net wrothis $3B, (3) for China, the cut-off net wroth is $2.8B and (4) I also exclude all those who made their fortune primarily as casinos operators. Now I have an eBook of global appeal, with all countries and continents in the world well represented. I do not want to write an eBook for just for Americans or Chinese.
My second challenge is the complexity of the biographies and data. I stared at the facts for over 1 months, unable to make sense of information in front of me. The youngest real estate SMB is Adam Neumann from Israel at age 36. The oldest is Stanley Perron from Australia at age 93. Neuman is a college dropout. Perron has zero high school education. While it took Stanley Perron 79 years to amass his fortune, Adam Neumann took only 7 years. 79 years vs 7 years to build an empire? This is a difference of more than half a century. Perron did it in the hot desert port of Perth, Neumann did it in cool downtown Manhattan. Perron is 57 years older than Neumann. Perron could easily have been Neumann’s great grandfather.
My third challenge to writing this eBook is my bias. To keep it minimum, I resort to an 80/20 approach: that is 80% facts and data, 20% analysis. This way, I respect my readers and they are free to form their own conclusions. 80% of this book are taken up by business biographies.
Here are my top 5 surprises in this pioneering study (1) 43% of the real estate self-made billionaires never went to college. 8 of them never went to high school. So if a high school education is all you got, you definitely have a chance. (2) More than 50% of them did not start with real estate. They started with car dealership, office furniture, rice trade, ceiling fan, as tourist guide, as lawyers, medical clinics, bee collectives and just about anything bizzare and irrelevant. In other words, most of them made their first fortune in another business, then plunged into real estate when they see an opportunity, or as a place to park their cash reserve. (3) They are concentrated in a few countries. US, China, HK, Israel, Brazil and Australia contribute more than 3 real estate SMBs, while there is only 1 from Japan; zero real estate SMB from Germany and France. If we rolled back the clock 30 years Japan would have the largest number of real estate tycoons (4) In terms of gender and ethnicity, I was very surprised to find good representation from 4 women and 4 Muslims. Good news, everyone has a chance. (5) There is a bifurcation going on in the real estate industry now. I call one group the sharing economy and the other one the traditional group. In terms of age, those from sharing economy have an average age of 30, while those from traditional real estate have an average age of 67. It took the sharing economy real estate SMB an average 7 years to achieve billionaire status. It took the traditional real estate an average of 30 years to reach billionaire status. Looking ahead,
For conclusion, I have 2 chapters (1) 16 lessons and (2) 9 future trends. As in all my other ebooks, I see a WORLD OF ACCELERATED CHANGE. The future of real estate in the world will be fast and violent. For aspiring real estate tycoons, the way to thrive is avoid the status quo like a plague. In other words, to create and not to copy.  The lifestyle and preference of the millennials will dictate the future real estate, just as the automobiles and the baby boomers have redefined real estate in the past 60 years. Are you part of this change?