Beginning in July and continuing through mid-September, Institutional Real Estate, Inc. (IREI), publisher of Institutional Investing in Infrastructure (I3), and its partners and consultants — B Capital Partners, Campbell-Lutyens and Kingsley Associates — surveyed 41 global investors and consultants active in infrastructure investment to understand their expectations and preferences for the market. This is the second part of an examination of the results of the I3 Investor Survey. The following article reviews several of the key preliminary results; a separate in-depth summary report will be available in first quarter 2013.

The growing shortfall in available public funds in the United States appears now to be creating significant activity in private investment in the nation’s infrastructure and leading to the establishment of a growing number of private-public partnerships to implement these projects. Certainly, during the past several years there has been increasing interest in these investments and in the use of P3, but actual activity has been limited and largely confined to a few states. 

The U.K. water sector often is held up as a model for what investors like in a market — predictable regulations, transparent risks and well understood return expectations. However, that stability is set to change as the U.K. government and the Water Services Regulations Authority (Ofwat) rolls out a series of long-term policies that will reform the market and affect the standard five-year asset management plans (AMP) on which the water industry operates. The current AMP began in 2010 and is set to change again in 2015.