Where We Deploy Capital
The sectors we fund, what makes a project fundable in each of them, and what tends to rule one out.
The sectors we fund, what makes a project fundable in each of them, and what tends to rule one out.
We are the counterparty rather than an intermediary, so what follows is written from the position of the capital.
Most projects arrive without the comforts a conventional lender insists on — the contract not yet signed, the tenant not yet secured, the price not yet fixed. That is the normal condition of a good project seeking funding, and we do not ask you to solve it before approaching us.
Solving it is the whole point of what L&EIP does. Their structuring takes the exposures that make a project look risky — completion, letting, price, currency, country — and moves them, one by one, to parties whose business it is to hold them. What is left is a protected income stream standing behind A-rated names. The project has not changed. What we are being asked to fund has changed entirely, from a bet on execution into a credit decision, and that is the only reason we can offer terms nobody else will.
The longest-dated, most essential assets there are — and still the hardest to get money into the ground for.
Mass transit and rail, roads and motorways, bridges and tunnels, water treatment and distribution, ports and terminals, telecommunications networks, social infrastructure and public-private partnerships.
Completion and performance exposure — the reason lenders will fund a finished asset but not the years of building it — is transferred out of the project before we see it. What is left in front of our investment committee is a protected income stream and the standing of the parties behind it. We are making a credit decision on a scheme a bank would call speculative.
Lenders will fund a completed asset far more readily than the years of delivery that precede it, and that gap is where most schemes stall. Building the financing around the whole life of the project rather than its safest phase is what converts a scheme regarded as speculative into one carrying an investment-grade profile from financial close.
Schemes that work on their own numbers, priced against the market a lender fears rather than the one the developer is building into.
Hotels, resorts and hospitality, offices and commercial developments, mixed-use and regeneration schemes, residential and build-to-rent, industrial and logistics, data-centre campuses, leisure and student accommodation.
Letting, timing and exit-value risk are what a developer normally carries alone, and what lenders charge so heavily for. Structured out and placed with parties equipped to hold them, they stop being our concern. We assess the protected revenue and who guarantees it — which is why the funding reflects the scheme rather than the cycle.
Timing, letting and exit-value risk all sit with the developer conventionally, and lenders answer with lower loan-to-cost, punitive mezzanine and covenants with no room for a delayed opening. Moving that revenue risk to parties equipped to hold it is what brings the cost of capital down and leaves the return intact.
Where the distance between a project's real risk and its perceived risk is widest, and where restructuring therefore changes the most.
Solar generation, onshore and offshore wind, biomass and bio-refining, geothermal, hydroelectric schemes, battery and grid-scale storage, waste-to-energy and recycling infrastructure.
Whether the offtake is signed, half-negotiated or absent, L&EIP builds a floor beneath the earnings that service the debt. Once that floor exists, neither construction risk nor the power price drives our decision. We are assessing the firmness of a protected income stream and the strength of the guarantor behind it — a credit question, on a project the market would price as an equity risk.
Conventional terms load these projects with equity at 15% or more — the most expensive money in the stack, deployed against the least risky part of the project. Establishing a floor beneath the earnings changes the credit profile outright, and the equity requirement falls with it.
Contracted revenue, hard assets and creditworthy tenants — underwritten by teams fluent in neither property nor technology.
Data centres and colocation facilities, digital and cloud infrastructure, hardware and semiconductor manufacturing, telecommunications networks and equipment, enterprise platforms with contracted revenues, and large-scale AI deployment projects.
We do not need the campus pre-let to look at it. Committed revenue is underwritten as it stands and the uncommitted portion is protected separately, so the whole facility is not repriced around the part that is still open. Structured that way, digital infrastructure behaves like infrastructure, and we fund it as such rather than applying a technology discount across the lot.
Sponsors in this sector spend most of a conventional process defending the asset class rather than negotiating terms. Structuring the committed and uncommitted revenue separately stops the uncontracted portion from depressing pricing across everything else.
Heavy capital, real assets, and revenue tied to prices nobody controls. The last of those is what conventional lenders charge for, twice.
Vessel acquisition and fleet expansion, mining development and processing plant, aircraft acquisition and fleet finance, specialist industrial equipment and heavy plant.
Commodity and freight-rate volatility is what drives every conventional credit assessment in this sector, and it is precisely what the structure removes — the downside capped inside the financing before we are asked to commit. That leaves us assessing an asset with a resale market and an income floor, rather than underwriting to the bottom of a cycle nobody can predict.
Conventionally a sponsor pays for commodity and freight-rate volatility twice — once in the margin, because the lender underwrites to the bottom of the cycle, and again in a standalone hedging programme with its own documentation and collateral. Building the protection into the financing removes both.
The jurisdictions most capital declines on principle, where separating the project from the passport changes the answer entirely. We work with sovereigns here as readily as with private sponsors.
Infrastructure and utilities, resource extraction and processing, manufacturing and industrial facilities, agricultural and agri-processing projects, and sovereign and state-sponsored mandates.
Political exposure is unbundled from operating performance and placed with specialists who price each element on its merits — convertibility, expropriation, enforcement, separately. Once the country risk sits elsewhere, what we are funding is the project itself, judged on its own economics. A strong scheme in a difficult jurisdiction becomes exactly what it always was underneath.
Applied conventionally, country risk is a blanket margin covering convertibility, expropriation and enforcement all at once — so a well-run project with hard-currency revenues pays exactly what a weak one in the same country pays. Isolating each exposure and transferring it to the right counterparty is what makes the funding possible at terms the project actually deserves.
If your project sits within one of these and you are unsure whether it clears the threshold, our funding criteria set out size, stage and submission requirements in full. The structures that make these terms possible are designed by L&EIP and explained at landeip.com.
The structures and outcomes described on this page are indicative and are provided for general information. Equity levels, pricing, coverage, terms and counterparties are determined case by case, following project assessment, counterparty confirmation and completion of documentation, and will vary according to the characteristics of each project. Figures shown reflect outcomes achieved on particular transactions and should not be read as a forecast or a representation of the terms available on any other project. Nothing on this page constitutes an offer, an invitation, or a commitment to provide finance.