Green Street broadens scope to unite real estate and infrastructure markets amid shifting investor preferences

Green Street has widened its remit beyond commercial property with the launch of Green Street Infrastructure, a move that reflects how investors are increasingly treating certain assets as part of a broader real assets universe rather than as separate silos. Daniel Ismail, the company’s co-head of strategic research, said the new platform is designed to combine real-time market data, deal intelligence and news across both commercial real estate and infrastructure, with the aim of building a single research offering for public and private markets globally.

The expansion comes after years of work inside the business and follows Green Street’s 2024 acquisition of IJGlobal, which provided news and data on infrastructure markets. Green Street’s own newsroom has since pointed to the launch as part of a wider push to deepen coverage of sectors where the boundary between property and infrastructure is increasingly hard to define.

Ismail told Bisnow that the shift is being driven by investor behaviour as much as by product strategy. Data centres, in particular, have become a clear overlap area, with institutions debating whether they belong in real estate or infrastructure. He said that question is becoming less important as Green Street moves towards a “real assets” framework.

The timing also reflects a broader divergence in market conditions. According to Ismail, infrastructure is attracting growing allocations and strong transaction activity even as commercial property continues to work through the effects of higher interest rates. He said fundraising, deal volumes and total returns have remained comparatively robust in infrastructure, helping to sustain investor appetite.

The firm argues there is still room for more capital to flow into the sector. Ismail cited Hodes Weill research suggesting institutional targets for infrastructure are around 6% of portfolios, while actual allocations remain about one percentage point below that level. Across global institutional portfolios, he said, that gap represents a sizeable pool of potential new capital.

Green Street is now extending coverage into transportation, which it views as a major component of infrastructure portfolios. Ismail said the sector can account for as much as 20% to 30% of an allocation and that some of its mechanics will be familiar to real estate investors, particularly where revenues are shaped by contractual structures resembling lease arrangements.

The company is also building out debt research in infrastructure, a sign that it expects investors to need a fuller view of capital structures rather than just asset-level pricing. Green Street said the aim is to help lenders and borrowers compare terms, duration and valuation across sectors and geographies.

For now, the strongest crossover remains data centres, where demand continues to accelerate. Ismail said capital is still flowing into both equity and debt at increasingly healthy pricing. Green Street has also observed a broader movement of assets such as cold storage, student housing and healthcare into infrastructure portfolios, where specialist expertise is becoming more valuable.

That evolution mirrors Green Street’s wider strategy. The company, which has long been known for research and analytics in commercial property, has recently expanded its sector coverage in other directions as well, including U.S. data centres and lodging. Its latest annual outlooks also underscore how seriously it now treats data centres as a global market in their own right.

Looking ahead, Ismail said investors will be watching allocation trends, AI-related demand and the continued reassessment of where certain assets are held. In his view, the next round of deal activity may be shaped as much by that classification debate as by fundamentals alone.