Prior to founding his own firm, Hong Kong–based Bei Capital Partners (HK) Ltd, in 2012, Collin Lau was head of global real estate with the US$575 billion China Investment Corp, a sovereign wealth fund established in 2007. With 27 years of experience in the industry, Lau recently spoke with Alex Eidlin, associate publisher of The Letter – Asia Pacific, about the challenges and opportunities he and his team experienced at CIC, as well as current market conditions for investors.

What were your main challenges while at CIC?

There were three main challenges: The first was building a consensus internally — on investment strategy and also every investment opportunity — because CIC is a very consensus building–oriented organisation. And, second, CIC is a relatively new organisation, which means it is new to the market. So it was a challenge to establish sources of intelligence, and external networks had to b