Editor's Note: Fair warning. This is going to be a long-read article, but it is insightful and worth the read. An often overlooked gear that makes Shanghai's engine of industry tick, are expats who have lived in Shanghai for decades. At first, we had thought to put Todd Gill into our "Movers & Shakers" column (for those of you who are new, a series we do on people of influence, gravitas and those who disrupt or innovate in spaces within Shanghai). Todd certainly belongs to that class of shanghai-ren.

But Todd comes to us with a unique view of Shanghai, and has been part of its transformation over the years, and is now driving transformation now within the real-estate sector as well as among Shanghai's entrepreneur's. Grab a bagel and a cup of tea (or something stronger), and enjoy the read.– Jacob Aldaco

For the last two decades, Melbourne transplant Todd Gill has had a front row seat to the radical change Shanghai's urban environment has undergone over the years, and as founder and CEO of property developers Cohost Group, he himself has served as a sometimes direct catalyst for said radical change. A self-described "Shanghai property nerd," Todd fell in love with the city after relocating here permanently in the mid-'00s. Getting into it just as a side gig in addition to his main line as an industrial designer, Todd began developing one-off creative office spaces, finding purpose, beauty and utility in the hidden rough concrete edges of a mid-'00s-era Jing'an district.

(There was a lot less going on there back then…)

A winding road of successful projects and ventures – and some not so successful, to be sure – led to the founding of Cohost Group and the launch of Cohost West Bund, Shanghai's first "co-living" space, in 2018. The project received international attention and acclaim and was at the forefront of a new trend in urban planning that centralizes the importance of sociability, healthy living, and good design.

In addition to that, this year Todd was named the President of EO Shanghai, the Shanghai chapter of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. We caught up with Todd at The Bridge House by Cohost to learn more about the new space, trace his own professional development over the years, and find out more about the Entrepreneurs Organization.

City News Service：When did you first get to Shanghai?

Todd Gill: So, I first came in late 2002. Within a short time of being here, I rented a house in front of Fuxing Park, and then spent the next five years traveling back and forth between here and Bondi in Sydney. In the first part of my career, I was an industrial designer by trade, and I was helping companies design and launch cosmetic and skincare brands with innovative packaging. During that time, I came up and worked with a China-based partner here on a few different cosmetic projects, mainly consulting with well-known cosmetic brands that were here in the early days. Our company, Container, grew until we had a healthy presence between Sydney and Shanghai, but we were also working on projects around the world. So, from here, I traveled to the UK and the US, and on a lot of projects in Australia, and I built the packaging supply team here in China as well.

I think Shanghai was a pretty wild and exciting place to be in those early days, where people made connections fast. There was a huge amount of opportunity here then. I think for many of us, our home country can be a little bit more traditional and staid, and Shanghai is a great correction to that. Here you just get so many diverse and interesting people in a fast-paced, in-orbit, never-sleep, always-on type of city.

Shanghai horizons and early developments

So how did you become a Shanghai property nerd?

Well, I also always had a fascination with the potential of buildings with good bones in Shanghai. Yes, an odd fascination, I know haha. But Shanghai is massive in scale when you consider that this city alone has more people than all of Australia. So I looked around, saw these huge buildings go up... and just over time, I began to wonder about them.

You know, what do you do? Who should you talk to in order to buy these buildings, or operate them? And why are these really beautiful buildings not being used to their full potential? I started in 2006 by setting up Build with my friend Brent, who was particularly good at finding these underutilized buildings. And we would just rent them, renovate them, and turn them into creative spaces. This started as a side gig for me.

Wait, so you were in cosmetics before, then started 'flipping buildings?'

That was always a side gig for me, and Cohost is the natural progression from that, where we're taking bigger buildings, putting a lot more care into regenerating them, obviously putting more money into renovating them, and then operating them for a longer time as well.

So what were some of your early projects when you talked about looking at buildings and re-purposing buildings?

In the early days, we took a couple of almost derelict buildings in Jing'an. The first one that we did was on Shaanxi Road – called The Foundry. We walked into this dumpy old factory space one afternoon and just thought, oh this looks great – let's rent it. Anything north of Nanjing Road in those days seemed like a long way away, We decided to turn it into a creative office. I sketched the plans by hand and used our own money for construction, and then we took one half to use as Containers head office and the rest we ran as an art gallery and rented out to a marketing company.

And from there, we started to look for more buildings. We took another one on Wuding Road where Soif is now, that natural wine bar. Jing'an has definitely transformed a lot since then. For me this was just a fun stage of my life in Shanghai where I was working with friends to build beautiful things.

I ended up selling the cosmetics business to my partners in 2013, and from there, I was fortunate to have a clean exit that allowed me to then spend a year or two doing some small investing and thinking about what else to do next.

And, honestly, out of everything that I've done in Shanghai, what excites me the most is working on real things in the real world that you can stand in, be in, and live in, at heart, I'm a builder. I don't think I set out to be a property developer, that's not my story. I just really enjoy the potential of buildings, I can see potential in them that most people don't. What they could be and how to transform them to add value, to take them, and help them reach another level of their potential. That creative process is something I love.

Shanghai's first co-living space, probably

So take us through the next phase, creating Cohost on the West Bund.

So I came into it more formerly when co-working was super hot here in Shanghai.. I remember going to dinner with, you know, Adam Neuman and his early Wework team when they first came out. They came here with a huge amount of money in their pockets, and they swung into the co-working industry pretty hard in Shanghai. They did the Yanping Road and then they did the Wuding Road building. You know, there was so much excitement around this new concept and they built a great team. So, I looked at that. I just thought there was no way I wanted to compete with these guys.

So, interestingly enough, when I was in New York, my apartment was on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, and they had their Wall Street project with WeLive on top. There was a lot of press and hype for this new community rental apartment concept called "co-living," and my natural thought is, well, if co-working got so big, co-living is going to get big also.

With that in mind, I got introduced to a couple of projects here, and I thought, well, wouldn't this be a great new thing to do in China, you know, something completely different in the rental apartment market. Finally, after looking at a couple of projects, the first one I came back for was to do No. 9 Donghu Road, above Pete's Coffee. That deal ended up falling apart, but I had the basis for what I wanted to do.

So when you're pitching large-scale, full-building renovation projects, who are you dealing with? City planners?

Well, at that scale, fairly large buildings, the owners are usually sophisticated investors, funds, family offices, and the government. And they each have their own idiosyncrasies, or needs. And, you've got to be very aware of how to interact and deal with each of them and how you can help them because they have a lot riding on each property.

How did the West Bund Cohost come into being?

During that time, somebody introduced me to Hong Kong investment fund that were looking to buy a hotel in the West Bund as their first project on the Chinese mainland. They invited me to make a proposal to them, and took me down there and said, What would you do? And I explained the co-living concept to them openly, and then they invited me back to work on it. There are obviously more complications in there, but at the end of the day, that was the beginning of the Cohost brand.

Fortunately, they got it. They were working on another co-living project in Hong Kong at the time as well, with another operator. So they really understood what the potential was.

We finished construction on that one at the end of 2018, and that was launched as Shanghai's first true co-living project. We worked with great architects, Vincent and Wendy at AIM Architecture who really understood what we wanted to achieve, and they did beautiful work and brought some great cultural and community thinking to the project – they just did Fotografiska.

Really, instead of just taking this old hotel and turning it into another shitty cheap hotel, we basically built a story and a set of values around it about how we can live as a community. And that became much more popular than we anticipated, which was fantastic. It seemed Shanghai had been waiting for something like that.

It was an immediate hit.

It was. Of course, everything is always location-based, and at the time, the West Bund was not a typical high-demand living location. And it was priced way above every other apartment in the area. But I think it's a beautiful, beautiful place to live. We had a gym, an indoor swimming pool and a row of retail on the front.

And it was only four stories tall. It had a very green feel with trees all around it, and it was right next to the botanical gardens as well. We had a secret gateway into the botanical gardens with an access card so you could walk through there in the mornings without the crowds.

I'm particularly proud of that project because it takes a long time to, you know, do these developments, and it doesn't always go as planned.

When we opened that one, the first one, we received a bunch of really great press, which I'm very thankful for – Ideat Magazine, Architectural Digest, Elle, Kinfolk and Nylon China all wrote really kind things. From there, I got invited to speak at a number of boutique hotel and property conferences.

And that was really strange in a way because it's not traditionally my industry. So I'm like okay; I'm very happy to get up and speak for a long time on stage and tell our team story because I was proud of what they achieved, and what we're doing. We didn't have anybody here to copy so we decided to lead.

Checking in to Cohost's Latest Venture – The Bridge House

CNS：Maybe, to start, you could introduce The Bridge House by Cohost? We're here in this fancy-looking place, interviewing you, so... let's give the venue an intro.

Todd: Sure, yeah. So coming off the heels of the opening of Cohost West Bund, we had created a successful proof of concept of a product for a more conscious place to live that was a little more social, and a little more interesting, and a little more cost-effective, with incredible design and comfort and other conveniences built in, with a great group of tenants living there. Coming off the rise of co-working spaces in the '00s, the concept of "co-living" came about, building off those ideas. I think we've evolved beyond the term "co-living," we don't really use it much anymore, but there's an emphasis on good design. Good design, healthy living, and an active social community. We've also always had the idea to just do something that's even higher quality, well-curated, and you can move straight in.

So in the Bridge House we have 152 apartments. We have one-bedroom lofts and two-bedroom family suites with the lofts between 12,000 and 14,000 yuan, and with the suites around 22,000 RMB per month. So, we've nestled our pricing under the serviced apartment price to be a little more human and, you know, a little more affordable.

We expanded the concept further with The Bridge House, The building was a bare shell when we started and we worked again with AIM in the design and construction of the interior, expanding on having more and larger places to connect with others in the building. We added special design touches into the public areas so that they become useful social areas. Gym. Kitchen facilities. Business facilities and meeting rooms. The Bridge House was an evolution of what Cohost West Bund started as.

The great thing about living there is that over time everybody kind of gets to know each other. Like a lot of people living in Shanghai, even if you've got people living three meters away upstairs, you don't actually know your neighbors. So here, you know, we program a little bit, so our tenants get to know each other and form their own friendships.

What is the profile of the people who are staying?

A lot of our guests would otherwise live in a serviced apartment or hotel. Some may have a house somewhere else, in another country, and come in because of their Shanghai office. In Zhangjiang, the area of Pudong where The Bridge House is, we're right near Hewlett-Packard's headquarters, and we have Pfizer, Novartis, Baidu, and Alibaba around the corner to mention just a few... this is semi-conductor and high-tech investment land.

We also have a hotel license for the entire property – you can find us on Ctrip and the major booking platforms – but we are more home than a hotel. The majority of our rooms and tenants are long-term, with only about 15 percent there for daily stay.

But the people who use our short-term services are generally people from surrounding businesses who know who we are and who love to treat us like a second home. Our team always strived to be more personable than a hotel and to create a much more comfortable and human environment.

Our goal when we built the company, and what we try to do with each project we create is to try to be "the best in the neighborhood." It's as simple as that, right?

Looking at property in 2024

How would you describe Shanghai's hotel market in 2024, coming out of COVID?

So right now, China's hotel market, honestly, is booming.

I mean, everyone's expanding. Post-COVID, the hotel market has come out with renewed energy and I think part of this is because COVID changed the market dynamics in the industry. The smart hotel chains spent money on activating the domestic market since inbound travelers weren't able to come over. The whole idea of "staycations" really took off and we got to rediscover China. After expanding consumer spending in domestic stays, combined with these visa-free policies, things are taking off in this space. But we still see a great opportunity for new boutique hotels, especially in the big cities.

What about future prospects for Cohost?

As a team, we spend a lot of time looking at new projects at the moment, and post-COVID, we're starting. We've got a couple of exciting deals in the pipeline coming up. But we are always looking for great partners to work with, whether local property owners who want to transform and elevate the value of their properties, or development companies that are looking for top-notch operators with unique brands that can drive value.

Being involved in the property market of Shanghai in the last two decades must be pretty crazy, though. Just the surface-level amount of change in the city.

I think, honestly, the craziest thing about it for me is that I'm not traditionally a property guy, right? So actually, the property market is a very close market for brokers and investors, and it's been a huge learning curve for me to step into that world and start to work out who the key people are here who have all grown up together and worked together, and people pop between different investment groups and different companies. So I've come at it from a slightly adjunct angle, and I had to learn along the way. I can't say it's always been easy as well.

So, you know, a lot of learning. Yeah.

Colleagues like these: the EO Shanghai – the Entrepreneurs' Organization

You were recently asked to be the President of EO... tell us about that.

So this year I was very fortunate to be asked to be President of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. We are a membership-led global network of about 20,000 business founders and owners around the world. The simple criteria to be a member is to be the founder or owner of a business that's doing over 1 million US dollars in revenue, which is just the minimum, and our members' businesses obviously range in size to be much much larger. So this year, I'm the president of the Shanghai chapter, and we're about 65 members strong now.

As a real founders organization, we're really only open to founders and majority shareholders of businesses. So that's obviously a bunch of very unique personalities.

Ending off, how do you like Shanghai in 2024? How's your optimism? What keeps you living and working in the city?

Well, here I have an amazing wife Grace and our 2-year-old daughter Chloe who was born eight days after COVID, right? So what keeps me here is definitely that. I think there's definitely been challenging times. But this is our hometown now and I've lived here longer than any other city.

How do I like it? I think, let's not talk about the last few years; they've been challenging, but I feel pretty optimistic about the city overall. It's a strong city. And super resilient.

I've lived in Australia, in Europe, and in the US. And truly, there isn't another place in the world like Shanghai. It's China's most progressive city, a beacon of connectivity and opportunity. The city has changed my life, and I'm here to see what the next era of the city will be.