While the amount of dry powder ready to invest in infrastructure assets piles up, putting money to work is proving to be somewhat of a challenge. The infrastructure investor community has seen some significant competition on all fronts.

Firstly, there is the re-emergence of significant fundraising activity where even the “big boys” are going head-to-head to secure long-term commitments from institutional investors. In some instances, placements are being allocated beyond 18 months in the future for both listed and unlisted funds. And then, when it comes to deploying capital, there is still a distinct lack of quality assets available that meet desired investment returns, resulting in an ever-increasing wall of money looking to be deployed.

As a result, over the course of 2018 we witnessed a flurry of refinancing activity of existing assets in operational stages as well as development stages, and increasingly in nontraditional jurisdictions (which we refer to later)