BAU 2027
Munich.

What BAU is, in two lines

BAU is the world’s leading trade fair for architecture, materials and construction systems: it brings together in Munich the entire construction value chain, from materials and products to building services technology and digital solutions, in front of architects, designers, construction companies and investors. It is a biennial event, held in January in odd years at Messe München across roughly 200,000 m² spread over 18 halls. The 2025 edition gathered 2,230 exhibitors from 58 countries (52% international) and over 180,000 visitors (44% international): it is not a niche sector fair, it is the point where the European construction value chain comes to see who specifies what.

Precisely because of this scale, the thing many exhibitors underestimate is that the real purchasing decisions don’t close at the booth. In construction the cycle is long: the architect evaluates a specification for a tender document, the contractor compares suppliers for a project, the dealer decides which lines to add to the catalogue. All of this matures in the weeks following BAU, when the prospect goes back to the studio or the construction site, picks up the materials they collected and opens the internal evaluation. Whoever handles leads poorly in the days and weeks after Munich loses exactly there the pipeline they paid dearly to generate. The fair presence is 30% of the work; the remaining 70% is what happens to the contacts afterward.

What to exhibit, where to exhibit

BAU distributes the entire construction value chain across the 18 halls of Messe München with a logic by product category and by construction phase, organized into over 30 exhibition sectors. The major thematic areas include:

• Building materials (solid, insulating, dry construction systems)
• Glass and glazing systems for the building envelope
• Wood and timber construction, modular and prefabricated construction
• Natural stone and tiles, ceramics and surfaces
• Doors and windows, facades and roofing
• Construction chemicals (adhesives, mortars, sealants, waterproofing)
• Building energy and technology, building services, lighting
• Digital solutions (BIM, AI, design and site management software)
• Tools and PPE, plus a dedicated innovation hub for startups

The practical positioning advice: choose the hall based on who you are looking for, not just on what you are. A facade systems manufacturer reaches architects if it sits in the envelope/facades area, but it also reaches energy designers if it is close to the building technology area. Study the floor plan and the flows before signing for the space: across 18 halls the distance between two halls is a real logistical problem for the visitor, and the location decides how many of the right profiles walk past you. If you sell digital solutions or innovative systems, consider being close to the innovation hub: at BAU it is one of the poles that attracts the most future-oriented audience in construction.

Visitor profile

The BAU visitor is professional, strongly a decision-maker or specifier, and with a real international axis. In 2025 the audience counted over 180,000 visitors with an international share of 44%: a solid center of gravity on Germany and the DACH region, but with a concrete European and global catchment. The typical composition of the audience at a construction fair of this scale:

• Architects and designers, the prescriptive heart of the audience (around 25-30%): they don’t always buy directly, but they decide what ends up in the tender document, so they carry enormous weight over the medium term
• Construction companies and building trades, a very significant share (around 25%): they evaluate suppliers, systems and products for concrete projects, often with faster purchasing timelines
• Investors and real estate developers (around 10-15%): they tour the fair for strategic vision, sustainability and asset efficiency
• Building material dealers and distributors, typical and high-value: they look for lines to add to their catalogue and representation agreements
• Engineers and building services/technology specialists: the audience that fills the energy, systems and digital areas
• Public administration and public sector clients: a minority share but with high spending power on major works

Average seniority is high and roles are prescriptive or decision-making. This is why the risk at BAU is not the scarcity of contacts, but the opposite: in five days at this density you talk with hundreds of people and, without a structured capture system, you remember a fraction of them. And when the visitor is an architect who specifies, knowing whether they decide, specify or just explore is worth more than the number of scans.

How to prepare in the 4 weeks before the event

Week -4 → Messaging audit

Verify that your value proposition answers the three questions every architect, contractor or buyer asks within the first 30 seconds at the booth:

1. What you do, in one sentence (e.g. “ventilated facade systems in fiber cement, certified for near-zero energy buildings”)
2. For whom, a precise ICP segment (e.g. “designers and contractors on multi-story residential and renovation”)
3. What changes, a measurable benefit (thermal performance, installation time, cost per square meter, certifications)

The German and international professional audience at BAU rewards concreteness: performance, certifications, technical data sheets and site references, not marketing. With competitors often in the same hall just a few meters away, a generic promise makes you indistinguishable. No vague slides, one clear sentence repeated identically by every member of the team.

Week -3 → Stand operation playbook

At a fair that occupies 18 halls and lasts five days, the risk is overload and dispersion. Define who does what:

• Who staffs the booth on the front line and welcomes the flow
• Who handles technical product/system demos and senior specifiers who show up
• Who stays in the back office (HQ) to start follow-up already during the event on the hottest leads
• How shifts rotate: in Munich the days are long and the quality of conversations drops after a few hours, so plan the team rotation

Also establish in advance how appointments are set: part of the best traffic at BAU, especially with architecture studios and large companies, is organized before the fair.

Week -2 → 3-question qualification form

Every contact collected must be qualified on the spot, not “later”. With over 180,000 visitors in five days, “later” is an indistinct magma of business cards. The critical questions are just three, and in construction they carry particular weight:

1. Role in the decision, do they specify (architect on the tender document), buy (contractor/dealer) or explore?
2. Timing, is there an open project or job? (tender/site in progress / design phase / catalogue within 12 months / exploration)
3. Scale, what size is the project or the annual volume behind the contact?

Everything else, company size, geographic area, type of works, software in use, is found in the 30+ public data sources that good automatic enrichment covers without you having to subtract precious time from the conversation to ask for it.

Week -1 → CRM integration

The classic mistake: contacts on paper, photos of badges, scans in the app, and then nobody pours them into the CRM. In construction the average follow-up starts days or weeks after the event, when the prospect has already talked to your competitors, who at BAU were in the same hall.

Configure the system so that every scan, at the fair, lands already in the company CRM, with event tag + qualification answers + voice note from the salesperson. Not in an Excel file, not only in the fair app, not in a sheet “we’ll sort out when we get back”. This is the step that decides whether the five days in Munich become pipeline or remain a pile of names.

Is the official BAU app worth it?

Yes, the BAU App (free, from Messe München) is a useful tool and should be installed: floor plan and map of the venue, exhibitor directory, on-site navigation, event program and visit planning. Across 18 halls, orientation is not trivial, and for the visitor the app is an excellent tool for not getting lost; for those exhibiting, it helps appear correctly in the directory and be found.

That said, you need to understand what the app does NOT do, because that is exactly the piece that generates pipeline:

• It does not export to your CRM. Contacts and favorites live in the fair ecosystem, not in HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive
• It does not enrich data. What you read is what’s there: no company size, type of works completed, verified role, software in use
• It does not qualify. It does not capture role/timing/scale on the spot, contacts remain indistinct
• It does not send follow-up. You have to build the post-fair sequence yourself, manually, after re-exporting the data
• It does not generate executive reports. At most a list of saved contacts
• It changes every edition. Login, features and data format are not a stable system of yours: it’s theirs, and the “BAU 2027” version arrives close to the event

The app is a good tool for navigation and orientation. As a commercial lead capture system fair → CRM → follow-up, it leaves uncovered everything that turns traffic into deals. That is the gap Linkly fills: scan at the booth → contact directly in your CRM with event tag, qualification answers and the salesperson’s voice note → 6 AI agents that enrich the data from 30+ public sources, qualify and trigger personalized follow-up → executive report. See how Linkly works.

What to do during the 5 days of the fair

Day 1 (Monday 11 January), opening and calibration

• Team briefing before the opening: review the 3 messages and the roles. The first day is for tuning the machine
• Quick calibration: the first 10-15 leads serve to adjust the qualification questions and the demo timing, then you hit cruising speed
• On Monday the flow is already substantial but more “exploratory”: many do a scouting round to come back on the central days. Capture everything anyway, even those who say “I’ll come back tomorrow”
• Short debrief at the end of the day: what works, what to correct, which hot leads to call back already tonight

Day 2 (Tuesday 12 January), traffic ramp-up

• The flow grows: the profiles who only scouted on Monday arrive, along with the first organized groups of architecture studios and companies
• Concentrate product/system demos and pre-arranged appointments here
• Keep one person in the back office on live follow-up: Monday’s hot leads should be touched now, not when you get back
• Maximum discipline on on-the-spot qualification: the dispersion risk rises with the traffic

Day 3 (Wednesday 13 January), peak day

• Usually one of the highest-traffic days, with the highest decision-making and prescriptive density
• Concentrate substantive conversations here with architects, companies and dealers who already have a supplier shortlist
• A good moment to close post-fair appointments with specifiers and project decision-makers
• Do a targeted tour of the halls: see the competitors, identify distributors and integration partners and understand how you are positioning yourselves

Day 4 (Thursday 14 January), consolidation

• Traffic still full, with conversations on average more in-depth: those who return on the fourth day often have a precise objective
• Dedicate it to substantive negotiations and to collecting concrete technical requests (samples, data sheets, tender items, configurations)
• Verify that every hot lead from the previous days is already in the CRM, qualified and with the next step agreed

Day 5 (Friday 15 January), closing, less traffic but more quality

• On the last day the flow drops, but those who come are often very targeted: fewer curious visitors, more operators with a defined objective
• Dedicate it to closing the threads left open, collecting the last technical requests and confirming the next steps agreed on the previous days
• By the end of the day the entire lead base must already be in the CRM, qualified and tagged: follow-up starts tonight, not next Monday

What to do in the 7 days after the fair

In construction the average time between the fair and the first post-event contact is measured in days, often in weeks: and the companies that reduce it to less than 48 hours close on average far more than slow competitors. At BAU this counts in an amplified way: your prospect met dozens of suppliers in five days, their memory window is short, and when it’s an architect who specifies or a company with an open project, the internal evaluation opens right afterward. Your competitors were in the same hall.

The winning follow-up playbook:

1. Within 24h, personalized email to every qualified lead based on role/timing/scale. No generic template: a concrete reference to something said at the booth (the project, the system, the technical constraint, the tender item)
2. Within 7 days, a dedicated salesperson assigned to every qualified lead, with a specific touchpoint scheduled (site visit, sending samples, technical call, tender item). No batch email
3. Within 14 days, deliver on the promises made at the booth (technical data sheets, quotation, samples, configuration, tender items). Automatically extractable from the salesperson’s voice notes if the system recorded them
4. Within 30 days, executive report on performance vs objective: distribution by salesperson, type of buyer (specifier/contractor/dealer), hall/origin and estimated pipeline. It is the document with which you justify to the CFO the budget to return at the next edition

This is the point where Linkly’s 6 AI agents work in your place: contacts arrive already enriched and qualified in the CRM, the follow-up sequences start on their own with the right angle, and the executive report is generated without manually rebuilding anything from an export.

Practical FAQ

How much does it cost to exhibit at BAU 2027?

Official costs must be requested from Messe München and depend on floor space, hall, type of stand (space only vs turnkey) and visibility. As a purely indicative figure for a world fair of this scale, the space line typically starts from several hundred euros per square meter, and a complete outing (space + setup + staff + travel + logistics) for a medium stand easily falls in the order of tens of thousands of euros. These are indicative estimates, not quotations: ask the organizer for the updated price list and reason in terms of cost per qualified lead, not cost of space.

Which is the best day to staff the booth?

The central days (Wednesday and Thursday) generally concentrate the highest traffic and the greatest decision-making and prescriptive density. The opening Monday is more exploratory, Friday drops in volume but brings very targeted visitors. In practice: every day counts, but plan the main demos and key appointments on the central days.

When should visitors register?

Online and in advance, from the official website. Early registration is the standard route, gives the digital ticket (manageable from the BAU App) and avoids queues at the entrances. For exhibitors, the space must be requested from Messe München well in advance: BAU is held in January in odd years and the best halls are planned many months ahead.

Is the official app enough to manage leads?

No. The BAU App is excellent for navigation, map and exhibitor directory, but it does not export to your CRM, does not enrich, does not qualify and does not send follow-up (see the dedicated section above). To turn scans into pipeline you need a fair → CRM → follow-up system like Linkly.

What is the alternative to collecting leads on paper or photos of badges?

Paper and photos of badges are the surest way to lose contacts: nobody pours them into the CRM in time and the on-the-spot qualification disappears. The alternative is to capture at the booth with a scan that lands directly in the CRM, with event tag, qualification answers and voice note, and automatic data enrichment. This way follow-up starts within 24h instead of after weeks, while the prospect’s evaluation, tender document or project, is still open.

Page updated ahead of the 2027 edition. For official information and exhibitor/visitor registration please refer to the bau-muenchen.com website.