REFIRE
Every year, when October comes around and Munich fills with real estate professionals for Expo Real, the event acts as a barometer of where the industry thinks it is and where it believes it is going. The gathering does not lead the market. It reflects it. That is precisely why the decision announced in April — that Expo Real 2026 will be re-named the International Trade Fair for Real Estate, Investment and Infrastructure — deserves more attention than it has so far received.
The re-naming is not a marketing decision. Claudia Boymanns, Expo Real's exhibition director, was explicit when asked where the impetus came from. "It came from the industry," she said. "For years, many market participants have observed that real estate and infrastructure investments are converging and are increasingly viewed together from an investor's perspective." When 42,000 visitors and 1,742 exhibitors from 34 countries effectively vote to redefine what their industry covers, something real is being acknowledged.
What is being acknowledged is a shift that has been building quietly for several years but is now accelerating. The boundary between investable real estate and investable infrastructure is dissolving. Data centres, schools, ambulatory healthcare facilities, nurseries and renewable energy installations do not look like offices or retail at first glance. But from an investor's perspective they share the same fundamental characteristics: long-term, capital-intensive real assets with stable cash flows and high location relevance. Increasingly, institutional investors are thinking in integrated real-asset portfolios rather than separate categories.
More fundamentally, the debate is no longer simply which property sector to buy. Increasingly, it is whether the distinction between property and infrastructure remains as meaningful as it once was.
The evidence in this issue of REFIRE supports that assessment. Germany's school infrastructure carries an investment backlog now estimated at €68 billion, against municipal investment running at roughly a fifth of what is needed. The founding of the Education Property Initiative — bulwiengesa and eight major partners coming together for the first time in a structured dialogue on educational real estate — reflects the recognition that organised private capital must fill a gap the public sector cannot. Germany's outpatient healthcare sector recorded more than €1 billion in transactions in a single quarter in Q1 2026, while purpose-built student accommodation has attracted €1.5 billion in new commitments in recent weeks from names including JP Morgan Asset Management and BGO. These are not isolated developments, but are actually strongly connected. Capital and expertise are following a new map.
The financing architecture is shifting in parallel. As banks retreat from real estate lending under regulatory pressure — capping development finance at levels that would have seemed unthinkably conservative a few years ago — debt funds are filling the gap not as opportunistic players but as permanent fixtures in the market. The CREMI data published this month shows senior loan spreads in European commercial real estate nearly tripling since early 2024, while leverage has compressed sharply. The cost and availability of debt is now a primary variable in every investment decision, whether the asset in question is a logistics shed, a school or a data centre. Capital structure is no longer a secondary consideration. For the sectors attracting fresh attention — social infrastructure, healthcare, purpose-built living — the ability to combine subsidised debt with private equity and patient institutional capital is precisely what makes the economics work.
Germany's subsidy system, described in this issue by Jan Bewarder of REM CAPITAL, is part of the same picture. KfW and BAFA programmes, state-level funding mechanisms and the new infrastructure and climate neutrality vehicle represent co-investment by the state in precisely the sectors where private capital is increasingly looking to gain exposure. The window in 2026, with the Ministry of Housing's funding allocation raised to nearly €13 billion and fiscal conditions more generous than they are likely to remain beyond next year, creates a rare alignment of public and private incentives. In education, healthcare and social infrastructure, the state is not stepping back from investment. It is restructuring how that investment is delivered — and inviting private capital to participate.
We would be doing our readers a disservice, however, if we presented this reorientation as uniformly good news. The same shift that is drawing capital and expertise toward newer sectors has a direct and uncomfortable implication for the assets and locations being left behind. Secondary office stock in peripheral locations, traditional retail struggling to attract institutional management, substandard residential assets that no longer meet regulatory or market standards — these are not merely facing a difficult cycle. They are facing a more permanent form of neglect as the best minds and the most patient capital direct their attention elsewhere. When markets redefine themselves, the redefinition does not happen symmetrically.
This REFIRE issue documents both sides of that asymmetry. Credit is increasingly concentrating in Class A and capital-city assets, reinforcing the divide between sectors and locations attracting fresh capital and those being left behind. The panels we attended at the recent Rueckerconsult INVESTMENT Expo in Berlin captured the mood precisely: "Classic core is largely dead," in the words of one panellist; "No core asset stays core forever," in the words of another. The RICS Global Commercial Property Monitor shows credit conditions deteriorating in 28 of 30 markets globally — and notes that investment demand has not yet followed, though historically it always does.
The reassurance, if there is one, is that the analytical discipline required to invest well in infrastructure is not fundamentally different from that required to invest well in real estate. Location, cash-flow sustainability, tenant quality, cost and availability of financing, regulatory risk — these are the variables that matter in both categories. The categories are changing, but the discipline is not.
We look forward to October in Munich. The conversation, this year, will be broader than it has ever been.