Inside Ares’ Bold Pivot Into Infrastructure Secondaries

• Betting on infrastructure: Ares has launched a fund that taps secondary deals to bring higher yields and more liquidity to infrastructure investing.

• New at Newmark: The Newmark Group has acquired RealFoundations and the global digital consulting services that it is known for.

• Bringing the heat in Boston: A Boston pilot for window heat pumps could guide cities in cutting energy use while improving residents’ lives.

• Multifamily webinar: Centralization is helping apartment owners cut costs, reduce risks, and improve resident experiences. Sign up

Editor’s Pick

Inside Ares’ Bold Pivot Into Infrastructure Secondaries

Infrastructure has long been a high-stakes realm reserved for long-duration investors like sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, strategic operators. The idea of liquidity inside infrastructure—selling late-stage stakes rather than owning forever—has only recently been broken into by smaller investment firms. When Ares Management announced it had collected $5.3 billion for a new infrastructure secondaries fund, it was telling the market something: infrastructure liquidity is no longer fringe, it’s central to the next wave of alternative investing.

An Ares’ fund, labeled “Infrastructure Secondaries Solutions III,” is targeting acquisitions or investments in existing infrastructure interests such as toll roads, transmission lines, fiber networks, utilities, and energy platforms. While Ares has long invested in infrastructure equity and debt, this fund is a deliberate pivot to acquiring secondary positions in mature assets that already bear operational risk and cash flow. The capital raise, reportedly above target, suggests strong institutional appetite for that kind of risk-return profile. That capital is already substantial, $5.3B is a meaningful war chest in the secondaries space, especially in a domain where deals function in the tens or low hundreds of millions more often than billions.

This isn’t a minor expansion, it’s a strategic shift. Ares’ traditional strengths have been in credit, private equity, and real estate. In infrastructure, it has invested in greenfield or growth-variant plays. But secondaries is a different game that involves underwriting legacy risks, analyzing deferred capital needs, negotiating with incumbents, and structuring exit paths. The margins, capital commitment, and institutional relationships required are different. Success in infrastructure secondaries requires builder-level diligence married with liquidity engineering.

This move might mean that Ares is looking to capitalize on the illliquidity premium inside infrastructure—a space that historically has poor resale markets. By building an engine for secondary liquidity, Ares could become a preferred buyer or partner in infrastructure exits. It also allows cross-leverage: Ares’ primary infrastructure team can pipeline deals or co-invest alongside secondaries deals, offering continuity and optionality.

The public market will be watching close how this plays out. Ares trades as an alt manager whose valuation is sensitive to its fee-bearing AUM growth and perceived durability. Investors will now benchmark its infrastructure secondaries fund performance and compare it with its credit and real estate arms. If it executes well, this could help recalibrate the way investors see Ares as a company. The amount of capital that is being put into this fund shows that Ares is considers infrastructure secondaries not as a sideshow but as a core growth vector, and that shift could help the company's struggling stock that is now over 15% in just the last month.

Overheard

Newmark Acquires RealFoundations to Boost Its Tech Consulting

Newmark is doubling down on its tech and consulting play, announcing the acquisition of RealFoundations, a global real estate technology and consulting firm. RealFoundations helps property owners, operators, and investors with digital transformation, software selection, process automation, data strategy, and system implementation. The move gives Newmark access to deep advisory capabilities and a pipeline of tech-enabled transformation for its clients.

RealFoundations offers services like digital strategy, platform evaluation, system orchestration, and operational integration—essentially helping owners adopt best-in-class PropTech tools, streamline workflows, and connect systems across finance, operations, asset management, and leasing. Their "Digital” practice focuses on process digitization, vendor stacks, data governance, and analytics architecture. By folding that in, Newmark isn’t just expanding its advisory arm, it’s embedding tech execution into its brokerage/consulting offering.

For Newmark, this acquisition could help them shift from being strictly a real estate brokerage to full-stack real estate technology consultancy. In markets where brokers, owners, and developers are hungry for digital modernization, having a native tech consulting arm is a competitive differentiator.

Boston’s Window Heat Pump Pilot Could Be a Blueprint for Greening Multifamily Housing

Boston’s housing authority is piloting a fast-deploying decarbonization project using window-mounted heat pumps from San Francisco startup Gradient. The system can heat and cool a 500-square-foot unit without expensive electrical or structural upgrades, replacing outdated resistance heaters in a 100-unit senior housing complex. The devices install in under an hour, plug into a standard outlet, and take up minimal window space—delivering cooling for the first time to many residents who have struggled during increasingly severe summer heat waves. The initiative is funded by a state energy-efficiency program, supporting Mayor Michelle Wu’s 2030 public housing decarbonization goal.

Similar efforts are underway in New York City, where public housing is beginning a massive rollout of Gradient and Midea window units following a successful pilot. Studies show the economics are compelling: installation and operation costs are roughly 40 percent lower than centralized systems, and Boston expects even deeper savings—around $5,450 per unit versus $40,000 for full retrofits. The devices also mitigate health risks for vulnerable populations like the elderly and residents with chronic conditions, offering a quick, scalable path toward lower emissions and improved comfort.

For real estate nationwide, the implications go beyond public housing. Window heat pumps could accelerate decarbonization across millions of multifamily units that have been too costly or complex to retrofit. They represent a bridge technology—less glamorous than net-zero towers but far more attainable for the aging housing stock that defines many American cities. As policymakers and building owners confront climate mandates and tenant heat risks, the rapid, low-disruption approach tested in Boston could become a national model for balancing sustainability goals with economic reality.

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