Essential real estate and infrastructure have become a core focus for investors seeking defensive, resilient assets, according to John Murray, and that shift is reshaping how capital, deals and legal advice are structured across borders. In his role as managing director, legal, at Slate Asset Management, a global investment and asset management firm focused on essential real estate and infrastructure, he sees every day how assets tied to groceries, logistics, health, and energy hold up when markets turn, and investors become nervous.
Murray traces the strategy back well before the pandemic, but he says Covid made the market finally catch up to a thesis Slate had been building for more than a decade. During the crisis, he watched the phrase “essential workers” appear on the front page of newspapers every day, and the same lens quickly applied to property. As he puts it, “Covid was... a huge inflection point for a lot of people, and it really brought what is deemed essential to the forefront.” That clarity reinforced Slate’s view that assets enabling the distribution of vital goods and services are inherently defensive and should command serious long-term capital.
For Murray, essential real estate and infrastructure are not marketing slogans. They are, in his words, “really just real estate and [infrastructure] that enables the distribution of everyday essential goods and services to consumers,” he says. That means grocery stores, food-related warehousing, logistics hubs, health services and energy assets, as well as wind and solar infrastructure that keeps those systems running. When the world shut down, those networks stayed open, and investors who had already positioned themselves around those uses could see why the asset class deserved a premium.
That focus has hardened in the high-interest-rate environment that followed the pandemic. Murray says Slate has “reduced our office exposure and we’ve really accelerated the focus on essential real estate, because that’s where we believe we can find the best returns,” he says. With more capital sitting on the sidelines and traditional offices under pressure, he describes a posture that is patient but aggressive: wait for the right deal, move quickly when it appears, and ensure it aligns with the essential thesis in a jurisdiction the team understands or can quickly adapt to. Slate tries to “go where others aren’t,” he says, so it can transact in markets where competitors are cautious, but the fundamentals still work.
In addition to its footprint in Canada and the US, that strategy has pushed the firm deep into Europe, transforming what began as a German beachhead into a broader Western European platform. Murray has been closely involved in this build-out, not as a local-law specialist but as the Canadian generalist who knows how to frame risk and structure commercial priorities across jurisdictions. Rather than mastering every country’s rules, he relies on broker relationships and local experts to understand the nuances of the local regime, while he focuses on structure, risk, and execution.
Murray is clear that none of this works without the assistance of first-class external counsel. He does not pretend to be an expert in European law. As a Canadian lawyer operating across Europe, he sees his job as “the liaison between the commercial folks and the law firms,” translating what deal teams want into legal instructions and then back into decisions they can use, he says. That means knowing regional directives well enough to identify where regimes are similar, where they diverge, and how that affects structure, financing, and regulatory friction, while relying on local specialists for the fine details.
That experience shapes the advice he gives to private practice lawyers who are considering making the move in-house. In his experience, Canadian lawyers tend to be more generalist than their more narrowly specialized counterparts in other markets, and he thinks that is an advantage for in-house roles. He points to his own path, which has run through financial services, corporate finance, fund formation, public and private M&A, securities, and some tax and infrastructure coverage. That mix, he says, meant that when he joined Slate, he already knew “enough to be dangerous” across the major building blocks of complex deals and could help bridge conversations between business people and external advisers.
Murray warns younger lawyers against locking themselves into a narrow lane too quickly unless they are certain that is where they want to spend their careers. While he cautions against spreading yourself so thin that you never build depth, he argues that a broader range of files early on will pay off when a lawyer moves closer to the commercial heart of a business. From his vantage point, the most valuable in-house counsel are those who understand how their clients generate revenue, why they are raising capital, and what they hope to do with it next, not just the narrow question posed in the retainer letter.
The second point is attitude. He urges would-be in-house counsel to remain inquisitive and to closely monitor what their clients are doing beyond the immediate mandate. In his words, being in-house means you are “no longer advising and saying, well, that’s a commercial decision; you’re involved in that commercial decision.” For him, that is the payoff: having a genuine seat at the table as a company like Slate decides where to expand, which essential assets to back and how to structure those bets in a volatile global market.
Looking ahead, Murray expects those decisions to continue favouring Europe as tariff disputes and political uncertainty steer capital flows. At the same time, he notes pressure in Canada to build more renewable power, data centres and other energy-intensive infrastructure at home, which aligns with Slate’s focus on essential real estate and infrastructure tied to everyday needs. With patient capital still awaiting clarity on interest rates, trade policy and regulation, he says the firm is ready to move when the next wave of essential assets comes to market.