Infrastructure is often mentioned in the same breath as real estate. Both are long-term, income-producing real assets. But real estate has been part of institutional portfolios for decades now, while infrastructure is much newer. As such, fewer investors have allocations to infrastructure than to real estate, and those allocations tend to be smaller than their other real assets buckets.

This puts managers — particularly fund managers — in something of a bind. Infrastructure is clunky and expensive. It needs big bites. But there just aren’t as many investors looking for infrastructure commitments as there are for other alternative investments, and many of those investors large enough to really jump in are moving toward joint ventures or forming their own platforms. Those too small are simply deciding to give the asset class a pass. That leaves a limited number of mid-sized LPs for fund managers to bring into the infrastructure fund fold.

Despite the long odds, IRE