As we build our new physical world we end up thinking a lot about connectivity. We have come to the point where we can connect to anyone and anything in a network so complex it can be (and has been) considered the purest expression of art. But with all of this digital connectivity we also need to keep in mind that other types of connections exist, even if they have not been clearly understood.
There are lots of historical examples of human meta-connectivity. Ideas seem to have a way of coming to the world at multiple places at the same time. Ancient cultures that had no contact with each other seem to have had knowledge of each other and shockingly similar philosophies. Even something as transformational to our understanding of the world as calculus is claimed to have been invented by two people who had never met. While these synchronicities can’t be described scientifically they are too numerous to ignore.
So how does this apply to our built world? What can the property industry learn from some indescribable vibrational connectedness? Well, according to Zach Aarons, co-founder of the most active early-stage PropTech venture capital investment firm MetaProp, a lot. As an investor, he knows that timing is as important as foresight. He relates what he does to being an artist at times.
In a recent article, Aarons talked about the influence of his grandfather, who was one of the only artists to photograph Boston’s West End before it was demolished, and his father, who started real estate development firm Millennium Partners and is a passionate art collector. He learned that like an artist, an investor needs to have empathy. He wants to be tuned to what people are thinking, which frequency they are vibrating at you could say, in order to see the wave right before it hits.
