John Rodrigues is North American product development manager with Investment Property Databank (IPD), a global commercial real estate analytics firm that produces property indices for 25 markets around the world. He joined IPD in 2007, and is responsible for introducing new products to the U.S. market. In 2009, he began working with the infrastructure investment community to develop an unleveraged asset level global index and benchmark for infrastructure investors. Institutional Investing in Infrastructure senior editor, Drew Campbell, spoke with Rodrigues about this initiative.

How did IPD decide to get into infrastructure?

About four years ago several of our existing investment manager clients in Europe and the United States were beginning to explore infrastructure, and they asked if we had thought about expanding into the market. In terms of institutional investors, we thought the market wasn’t ready for an IPD-style product. It needed to mature,