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Q: Sayfco is a big Facebook success story with immense traction. Why and how did you start using Facebook?

A: In 2004, we established Sayfco Holding. Once the Facebook had started in 2007, I thought this is going to be the best media to reach out to most people. Obviously at first there were many skeptics who said that I’m dreaming if I thought I would sell real estate on Facebook.

But I had a vision where Facebook is not a question of being a social media, but it’s reaching out to as many people as possible. This is why I decided to use it. And so we’ve moved from selling 30-40 units per year into an average of 500-600 units in the past few months. In the past 3 years we’ve sold over 4000 units, most of them Lebanese—and these are real sales by the way. I don’t care about the numbers of fans I have on Facebook, it’s the sales I get that count. Today when I prelaunch on Facebook solely, I sell 60-70 percent of our project solely on Facebook in the first 1-2 weeks. People sign and pay 20% down payments. 

And Facebook contacted us and did the real detailed cases study to encourage other real estate developers in the world to use our strategy because we are officially the number 1 real estate page worldwide on Facebook.

Q: So now we have an answer to the question: can one sell real estate on Facebook? The answer is that yes one can.

A: But you can’t sell it like amazon.com. You don’t actually pay online and get the apartment. This is what people don’t understand. But what matters is that part of our 3.2 M [fans] are following us [on Facebook], and when we launch a project, we sell 70% of it quickly. That’s how we translate into having 22 projects; if we didn’t sell we wouldn’t start new projects obviously.

Q: The question now is at what price we can sell on Facebook, because Sayfco obviously spends a lot of money on Facebook. What is your typical marketing budget for a project?

A: Since we’ve founded the Facebook page we’ve spent close to over 3 million dollars. We’ve spent the majority of this budget (around 2 million) in the past two years, where we launched 20 projects. We can say that when we launch a project that needs, for example, a million dollar budget, 500 thousand goes for Facebook, 100 thousand goes for online portals like Naharnet, l’Oreint Le Jour, and we still go traditional marketing like TVCs , newspapers, magazines, because in this part of the world people need to see you on TV. We think of our own clients, when they’re watching the news and they see the project they feel proud.

Q: So we know how much you’re spending. If we want to figure out your ROI (Return On Investment) we need to know how much you’re making.

A: We told Facebook and they were amazed. For the 2 million dollars that we spent the last two years on Facebook, we’ve sold around 4000 units; that’s close to 2 billion dollars. I apologize for those who are annoyed, but all I can say is that ads are ads and we all know that you need them for the business to grow

Q: And your adverting strategies have been successful so…

A: Exactly. That’s what matters. 4000 youth were able to buy property in Lebanon, and I personally get in contact with a lot of them. They had blacklisted Lebanon, they wanted to leave, but because of our competitive prices and the facilities we give, these people—including 1000 to 1200 expats—have said ‘thank you, because of you we’re staying in Lebanon.’ That is a comfort for me.