I would agree that it’s unlikely a shopping center will be purchase via Twitter, per se. However, many top investors have openly discussed how, for example, watching what their teenage kids were doing are how they learn about good new investment opportunities. What if you scaled that up to monitoring the behaviors and interests of thousands upon thousands of people that might be customers at one of those shopping centers. Might knowledge of their changing interests lead to better commercial real estate decisions?

I would think it would. Maybe a tool could evolve that would take all that chatter on Twitter from a particular city, and turn it into an indicator of where the next “hot” neighborhood is emerging. Maybe growing discontent about a particular retailers products would provide valuable insight into whether they’re a worthy tenant. Maybe… lots of things.

They say that knowledge is power. You get knowledge from information. So while there may not be a day anytime soon where someone in the commercial real estate business buys a building on Twitter, there may soon be a day where a commercial real estate investor does much better than their competition by turning all that information on Twitter into knowledge.

I for one consider some of these new social media propositions like Twitter, Face book and Bogs just what they are — bs! Have you seen the commercial with the young people on the porch with their dad and mom talking about something while dad is sitting down and “twitting” a message “he is now sitting on the porch?” Complete bs, that’s all the majority of this stuff is. Good luck with Twitting in the ad business. I am flexible and may someday change my mind, but for now, no way!