Governments in much of the developed world need capital, and yet public budgets are stretched and voters are upset about rising taxes.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, there is demand for private capital solutions, whether for building data centres and healthcare surgeries, fixing roads, expanding airports and other infrastructure.
After the post-pandemic spike to interest rates in the UK, the rest of Europe and North America, rates have softened somewhat. And real estate/infrastructure often comes with the predictable cashflows and degree of inflation protection – particularly on the infrastructure side – that long-term investors seek. Wealth managers and family offices, for example.
Opportunities in this area are considerable and growing.
“It is a very large and liquid universe that you can invest in,” Mark Brennan (pictured below), manager of the recently launched Guinness Global Real Assets Fund, told WealthBriefing in an interview. The fund is run by can bring to a portfolio,” he said.
The real assets/infrastructure story is not new, of course, but it has certainly seen an uptick in momentum. Large asset managers such as BlackRock, for example, have ramped up infrastructure efforts. In January 2024 BlackRock said it had bought Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP). In December 2023, Middle East alternative investment firm Investcorp bought a 50 per cent stake in the $4.8 billion infrastructure business of US firm Corsair Capital, to give another example. For years, Australia's Macquarie has been a big player in the space.
On the real estate side, it has been a constant feature of wealth management portfolios, and particularly so among family offices. After a slight decline, latest figures from showed that in the first half of 2025 brick-and-mortar asset’s share of total family office investment was at 39 per cent of the total, the highest since the second half of 2019, just prior to the pandemic.
New fund
The new Guinness fund’s portfolio consists of listed infrastructure and real estate companies that own and operate assets across sectors including utilities, transportation, communications, digital infrastructure, data centres and healthcare. The fund was launched in early July.
The portfolio is roughly 25 per cent closed-ended funds (in the form of real estate investment trusts) and 75 per cent infrastructure company equity; it uses Guinness’ allocation process of around 35 equally-weighted holdings. Other members of the responsible investment team working alongside Brennan are Francesca Wheble, responsible investment lead, and Eamon Devaney-Dykes, responsible investment analyst.
Brennan said he uses standard approaches to evaluate underlying investments, such as a business' ability to produce steady cashflow, the quality of management, and a track record in paying dividends. Besides stock picking, he and colleagues apply a top-down approach, looking at trends in a sector and the wider economy.
Out of a total real asset/infrastructure universe worth about $5 trillion, listed companies are filtered for exposure to target infrastructure and real estate sectors, and for a minimum market cap of $500 million. Further screening for cashflow returns, leverage and dividend growth cuts the firms to a universe of 112 companies. The amount is reduced further after a series of decisions; at present, the fund holds 35 companies.
The new fund is benchmarked against the MSCI World Core Infrastructure Index. In weightings terms, the Guinness fund is slightly underweight US companies on valuation terms, Brennan said.
“Utilities is still the biggest allocation,” he said, referring to areas such as gas, electricity and other forms of power.
What sort of risks affect infrastructure?
“This is always a sector where you need government policies to be in your favour,” he said. For example, in Germany the government is pushing infrastructure and defence spending, responding to US calls on Europe to do more in this area amidst the Russia/Ukraine conflict.
Governments also continue to promote energy transition and the country-wide power blackouts in Spain in late April highlighted power grid vulnerabilities that will need to be fixed, Brennan continued.
Electricity power generation is also a growth story when considering the demands from areas such as AI and data centres, he said.
Nuclear energy, which has been frowned on politically for years, appears to be making a comeback, Brennan said. “Everybody is trying to procure and get hold of it,” he said.
“In the past, when I talked to ethically-focused clients, nuclear power would have been a hard exclusion,” Brennan said.
Health and ageing
Healthcare-related infrastructure, such as health clinics, GP surgeries, hybrid communities for seniors in the US, and other areas, are growth topics for the fund.
In the US, for example, “MOBs,” or medical office buildings, where hospital facilities are taken off campuses and put into communities to be more accessible, is a growth zone.
The fund only invests in listed companies, and not private market firms, Brennan said.