A couple of weeks ago, I spent three days among 36,000 of my nearest and dearest friends at Expo Real in Munich, Germany. Although the event is billed as a trade fair for the real estate industry, the symbiotic relationship between infrastructure and real estate was obvious everywhere you looked. Stands hosted by city, state, regional and country governments all featured large, glitzy scale models of new urban areas complete with retail, office, hotel and residential development — some were so large and detailed that you wondered if you were entering the actual city. But woven through those shiny new scale-model buildings were new roads, metro lines, sustainable power plants, bridges, transportation hubs and other infrastructure needed to support the growth of commercial property assets.

Government entities recognize the intertwined needs of the two asset classes. It isn’t enough to attract a business to the city center or find an i