Biography
Bjarne Bauer is German and has spent 22 years in China, which is long enough that his real expertise is not a sector but a country. He is Managing Partner at NAI Sofia Group in Shanghai, working in commercial and industrial real estate, the factories and warehouses and sites that foreign companies need when they decide to actually operate here instead of just importing.
He built the firm from scratch, and he talks about it the way people do when they remember every unglamorous step. He also runs a YouTube channel called Crazy Buildings, which tells you something about how he sees his own field, he actually finds it interesting, not just transactional.
What makes him a good guest is that real estate turns out to be a door into everything else: how deals really get done in China, how trust gets built, what foreign companies keep underestimating when they sign the cheapest lease they can find.
Areas of expertise
- Commercial & industrial real estate
- Doing business in China
- Building a firm from scratch
- China property market
- Networking & relationships
- High vs low context cultures
What the conversation covered
We talked about building an industrial real estate firm from nothing, and his warning that the cheap factory is usually the one that ends up costing you the most. He walked me through the China property correction without the panic, and how he thinks about the market after the easy years ended.
His line on networking stuck with me, that you harvest what you sow, said by someone who has clearly been sowing for two decades. We also got into high context versus low context cultures and how that trips up newcomers, and then, because life abroad is never only business, the story of having awake brain surgery in Shanghai.