Just for everyone's benefit, we do have a webcast, so this is transmitted elsewhere. I just note that to everyone that's in the room. Good morning, everyone, for coming. It's 10:30 A.M. and time to begin the Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders of Brookfield Asset Management. My name is Bruce Flatt and as Chief Executive Officer of the corporation, it's my pleasure to chair today's meeting. In fact, our Chairman, Frank McKenna, is traveling today after leaving this morning with President Clinton, in fact, to open up the McKenna Leadership Center at St. Francis Xavier University, and he sends his regrets for not being here. It certainly is a special day for him and we wish him well. I'd just say on behalf of the company, we're very lucky to have Frank as our Chairman.
On behalf of the Board and my colleagues, I'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone here, including everyone on the webcast today. I will now call the meeting to order and would ask CIBC Mellon Trust, by its representatives, Tony Tacaña and Charito de Vera, to act as scrutineer. I'll also ask Jeffrey Haar, who's in the front row here, to act as our Corporate Secretary for today's meeting. It's my pleasure to introduce Brian Lawson, who is sitting beside Jeff, and he'll talk to you a little bit later about some of our financial and other matters in the company. As outlined in the circular, just as a formality, there are four matters to be voted on today. The first is to receive the annual report, as usual, for the company and for the year ended December 31, 2010. Second is to elect the directors.
Third is to appoint the company's external auditor and authorize directors to set the remuneration. Fourth, which is a special item, is to consider the resolution approving amended escrowed stock plan. In order to expedite the formal part of the meeting, we've asked certain shareholders to move and in some cases second various resolutions, although the procedure is not meant to discourage anyone from asking questions or doing anything else with those resolutions if you so wish. It's just to expedite the efforts. I'm advised that the notice calling this meeting and the management information circular were sent to the shareholders in accordance with all applicable requirements, and I've asked Jeff Haar to keep a copy of the notice and proof of mailing with the minutes of the meeting today.
The minutes of last year's meeting, which was held May 5th, 2010, are also available should any shareholder wish to review them. Based on the scrutineer's preliminary report on attendance, the Secretary has confirmed that there is a quorum present. I therefore declare the meeting properly constituted for the transaction of business for which it has been called. Turning to the first item of business, I'll now table the company's 2010 annual report to shareholders, which includes the 2010 financial statements together with the external auditor's report. A copy of that report had been mailed to our shareholders who so requested and is also available as you walked in, and we'd obviously be happy to give you one if you didn't get it already.
The second item of business at our meeting today is the election of the company's directors, and it's now my pleasure to introduce the 16 director nominees standing for election this year. In order to assist you in identifying those people, their pictures will be shown on the screen if our technology works as I read their names. As a beneficiary of this, I can say each of those directors has made a substantial contribution to your company, and we as shareholders are extremely privileged to have them working with the company. The eight proposed nominees for election by holders of the company's Class A shares are Marcel Coutu, Maureen Kempston Darkes, Lance Liebman, Wallace McCain, Frank McKenna, Jack Mintz, Youssef Nasr, and Jim Pattison.
The eight nominees for election by the Class B shareholders are Trevor Eyton, Jack Cockwell, myself, Jim Gray, David Kerr, Bob Harding, Phil Lind, and George Taylor. Fifteen of the 16 proposed nominees who were elected at last year's annual meeting in May 2010 are standing for reelection today, and we thank them for that. Mr. Nasr was appointed to the Board on November 4th, 2010, and he has served since then. Additional information on all of these people is set out in the management information circular, which was mailed to shareholders along with the formal notice of this meeting. At this point, the meeting is now open to receive nominations for the election of the proposed directors.
Brian Lawson?
Yes.
For election?
Thank you, Brian. Are there any further nominations? Seeing nothing, I declare the nominations closed, and as there are 16 directors to be elected and the same number of nominees, I now declare that those nominated have been duly elected directors of the Corporation by acclamation. Ladies and gentlemen, our directors are all here today, or almost all of them are here today, and they're wearing name tags, and I hope you'll have an opportunity to meet them if you have not already. The third item of formal business is the appointment of the Corporation's external auditor and authorizing the directors to set their remuneration. As stated in the information circular, the Audit Committee of your Board of Directors has recommended to the shareholders that Deloitte & Touche LLP be reappointed as the company's external auditors. Will someone now please move a resolution for the appointment of the external auditor?
Thank you, Marcel. May I have a seconder, please? Thank you, Katherine. The resolution has now been moved and seconded. The motion is now before the meeting for discussion. Is there any discussion? Adoption of this motion requires the favorable vote of a majority of the votes cast at the meeting by the holders of both the Class A and the B shares. Management has received proxies representing approximately 71% of the Class A shares and 100% of the Class B shares, which incidentally is a high number for a public company to receive when they get their proxies in. These proxies direct me to vote virtually 100%. It's 99.7% of the Class A shares and 100% of the Class B shares in favor of the resolution.
As management holds proxies to vote a minimal number of shares against the motion, we propose to conduct a vote of this motion by show of hands unless someone here who is entitled to vote wishes to have a ballot. Would anyone in the crowd like a ballot? If not, I'll call for a vote by a show of hands. All those in favor, please. Thank you very much. Any against? I don't think the Deloitte & Touche people will vote against. I declare the motion carried, which would go to the last item of business, or fourth item of business, which today this meeting constitutes a special meeting since shareholders are being asked to consider a resolution to approve an amended escrowed stock plan. This plan is a compensation arrangement created for key executives in the company.
It is less dilutive than other types of long-term plans such as option plans. As a result, we recommend that the shareholders approve this plan. It's now in order for someone to move this resolution, please. Thank you, Katherine. May I have a seconder, please? Thank you, Brian. Adoption of this motion requires a favorable vote, similar to the last one, of a majority of votes cast at the meeting by holders of both Class A and Class B shares. Management has received proxies representing 68% of the Class A shares and 100% of the Class B shares. These proxies direct us to vote 98.8% of the Class A shares and all the Class B shares in favor of the resolution.
As a result of that overwhelming positive vote and minimal shares that are against it, I propose to again conduct the vote by show of hands unless someone who is entitled to vote would like to have a ballot on this item. Is there anyone that would like a ballot? Seeing nothing. If not, I will now call for the vote by a motion of hands. All those in favor? Thank you very much. Any against? I declare the motion carried. Ladies and gentlemen, that's the four items we had in the formal part of the meeting, and we'll move to the management presentations. Brian Lawson's going to begin the presentation today with an overview of our financial performance and talk about some of our operating businesses. I will then come back and make a few comments just on some things that are affecting the company.
After that, we would welcome any questions from you. Please note that in responding to questions and in talking about our new initiatives and our financial performance, we may make forward-looking statements. These statements are, as usual, subject to known and unknown risks, and future results may differ substantially. For further information on known risk factors, I'd encourage you to review the MD&A of our annual report, which is available today at the registration desk, on our website, or obviously in many other places. With that, I'll turn it over to Brian to talk about our results.
Great. Thank you, Bruce. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for coming to the meeting today. As Bruce mentioned, I'm going to cover off a few things here before handing the podium back to Bruce. I'll hit on our operating results, talk a bit about the financing strategy, cover a bit on our asset management, some of the capital under management, and then just close with a slide on the value creation, how we add value in the firm, and a brief summary before Bruce takes over. Turning to 2010 for a moment, it was a year of significant progress for us on many fronts. In particular, on building out the funds under management, the asset management side, we increased the fees and the capital raised. We're now up over $50 billion of capital under management for our various clients, $190 million of annualized fees.
That's up 7x over the past five or six years. We have a number of funds in marketing as we speak. I think what's very important for us is we've managed to expand our relationships to include virtually every relevant institution globally. We think we've been significantly assisted in this regard with how our strategies and how the business has performed over the past number of years. That, I think, has made our lives a lot easier in attracting new clients to the firm. We did a lot last year in terms of expanding the global platform. We were assisted in this regard with two of the more successful and, I'll say, exciting and dramatic restructuring initiatives.
One was the completion of the Prime Acquisition, which was buying that Australian infrastructure business, which took the assets in that part of the business up to $16 billion and gave us a truly diversified global portfolio in an attractive array of businesses, which provides a great platform for future growth in addition to the great going-in returns that we think we achieved with that. General Growth as well. It's an exceptional retail portfolio, gives us a leading presence in the U.S. marketplace. Bruce is going to speak on these points later on. We reorganized our office business into a pure-play global office company and merged our U.S. and Canadian residential businesses into a uniquely positioned North American company. I think we've continued. We've benefited a lot from the attractive capital markets of late. That's enabled us to maintain a very strong financial position and the operating results.
That's in large part because of the way that we've built in the consistency in the operating class cash flows through the long-term contracts that we have in place across most of our major businesses. We continue to operate with about $4 billion of liquidity, so we're well positioned for future acquisition and development opportunities and continue to maintain that investment-grade long-term financing strategy. We raised the capital in the markets for about $16 billion during 2010, another $11 billion so far in 2011. We continue to be very, very active on that front. Just a couple of thoughts on the operating results. You'll see this is a track record over the past few years. On an annual perspective, very stable. What we've observed there is good sequential growth in the large property, power, infrastructure businesses.
Starting off in 2008, we saw a similar, the other way, a sequential decline in some of the businesses that were more sensitive to the economic cycle. We've seen that in large case pretty well across the board bottom out and start to come back. Looking at the quarterly results, 2010 stands out as a year where we had a large number of disposition gains, roughly $130 million more than we got in the previous, sorry, in this quarter. That explains a lot of the difference. Notwithstanding the fact that we've seen some very good growth in, for example, the timber operations and other parts of those more economically cyclical sensitive businesses I mentioned in the first quarter, unfortunately, that was, I'll say, masked in some part because we had lower water levels in the hydro business. That's just part of the fact of life of hydro.
Some quarters will have, it is all very steady over a long-term basis, but we will have quarterly anomalies in that regard. Some of the themes that we've observed there on the power side, as I mentioned, variability of water flows. It was 8% below long-term averages in the first quarter, but over the long term, very stable. We've continued to work away at building in more long-term contracts at favorable pricing. We're now up to roughly 70% of the businesses in the form of those long-term contracts. We have 87% of the businesses locked in for the balance of 2011. That provides good stability. On the property side, consistent growth on a same-store basis, up 4% quarter -over -quarter, 8% actually if you take into consideration currency movements. Improved leasing, very strong leasing markets in a lot of our major markets.
Of course, we did have the first quarter of contribution from the General Growth investment, which added in $50 some odd million to our cash flows. On the infrastructure side, I mentioned the expansion through the Prime Acquisition that added to our cash flow as well. We've had a number of capital expenditure initiatives building out the businesses and some favorable rate reviews, which permitted increasing cash flows in that regard. I did mention the fact that we've had a lower contribution from some of the economically sensitive units, but there's been very strong Asian demand for timber. We've ramped up from 20% of exports, say, five years ago to well through 50%, and we're getting really strong pricing there.
On the financing side, this is an area that, given where the markets are, the availability of capital and the interest rate yield with the 10-year, for example, coming down into the 3.20% range, we've got a couple of major objectives here. One is to try and lock in those low rates where we can. Second, perhaps more importantly, is to extend out the term and match fund those long-term assets that we have. Our observation is that the yield curve continues to be pretty steep, and that's made it difficult to make too much progress in the medium-term maturities and make all payments. We've been very aggressive in refinancing our near-term maturities and have had a lot of success in that regard.
As I mentioned before, we've been refinancing $8 billion - $9 billion of debt in the various periods, generally knocking 30 basis points- 50 basis points off, but more importantly, extending out the maturities. We did a couple of big financings in the infrastructure side and added 13, took them out to 13 years. General Growth took theirs out. I think the recent financings they did there had an average term of 10.3 years. It's a great opportunity there. Just turning quickly to the capital under management, as I mentioned, we're through $50 billion here. By what I would describe as product, this shows the breakout between our private funds, which would be the real asset funds such as the Brookfield Americas Infrastructure Fund. Managed listed issuers would be things like Brookfield Infrastructure Partners that's listed. We manage it. Then the public securities that we manage on behalf of our clients.
The vast majority of these funds, in fact, everything other than the other listed entities there, which would be, say, the floating of Brookfield office properties, we earn some form of compensation on. We have continued to ramp up the amount of capital that we're managing that is fee-bearing capital to our benefit. On the right-hand side, that shows you the breakout by industry sector. On the private funds and managed listed issuers, $23 billion of that would be the committed funds in the various sectors. It's spread around. You'll see a lot of it in the infrastructure and real estate side of things. Within that is about $8 billion of what people describe as dry powder. That's what is available to us to request from our clients to fund new acquisition opportunities. That's pretty nicely diversified around our major areas of focus these days.
I mentioned earlier the base management fees. This is a part that's quite important for us as it shows the growth and the contribution of the fees that we earn from this aspect of the business. They've grown substantially over the recent past. I would say that this is, in fact, even understates it a bit. It's around $7 billion of our funds that we operate have a fee structure that's geared more towards performance and less. There's really a pretty small contribution from the base management fee. If anything, the economics are building up more favorably and quickly than this slide would suggest. Lastly, just before I wrap up, this is one of the things that we've been trying to work within our disclosure materials, our communications with investors, and it's just how is the value created within Brookfield?
What I think is pretty clear, if you look at our financial statements and just the assets that we have on the book, so to speak, there's around $20 billion of invested capital. We report to you each quarter on our view as to what those are valued at, largely through the IFRS financial statements, which carry most of our assets at fair value. We adjust to reflect some of those that aren't. Another big part of the value in the firm is the value that's added through the capital that we have under management and which we quantified for the first time in our 2010 annual report. We ascribe a value of roughly $4 billion on that, which is the rough maths around that.
It assumes that we build out our capital under management at a growth rate of around 10% a year and take it up to roughly a gross margin contribution of 150 basis points and PV that, discount that back at 15 x. That's what we're working to create and lock in through everything that we're doing with raising new funds in our client relationships. There is what we refer to as the broader business franchise, which is everything that we do constantly to reallocate capital around the firm and compound those cash flows at higher returns and build value for that. We don't capture that value. We don't quantify that or put that in the published intrinsic value, which, if you do the math, was $37.76 at the end of the first quarter. That's a very important part of the value that we think that we've built within the firm.
Just to summarize my comments before handing the podium back to Bruce, we've achieved a lot of good growth in both on the operations side and on the capital side during 2010, continuing it at 2011. We continue to operate with a very strong financial position, and we are constantly working to extend out the financings, access to new sources of capital. We feel we've definitely benefited from the stable earnings profile that we've established in the firm and how that's played out over the past while. I think as important as anything is that sitting here today, we feel we are very well positioned for continued growth. Bruce is going to comment on some of those aspects in his remarks. With that, I will hand the podium back to Bruce. Thank you.
Thanks, Brian. There are eight topics we thought we could talk about today. Instead of doing a presentation, which resides on our website and you can all go look at it, we thought there were eight things that we generally get asked by investors. I thought we could talk a little bit about those eight items just to shed light on some of them. The first one is our view of macroeconomics and the implications for Brookfield. Bottom line, I would say we don't have strong views on macroeconomics. I think the only thing we try to do in our business is when we believe there's a lot of risk in the world, we try to understand the global situation and make sure that we're protected. When we believe there's less risk, we can be, I'd say, more aggressive in the things we do and continue to invest.
Reflecting on that, in 2007, we were lucky that we have a number of businesses that show us things before the market sees them generally, which allows us to get ready and prepare for the things that are coming. It's really just grassroots level business things that are happening. In 2007, we saw a number of things. I think one of the fortunate things we had going through 2008 is that we saw a lot of those things early in our businesses that allowed us to be prepared. Reflecting on today, I'd say the opposite is happening today. Virtually in every one of our businesses, we see grassroots level positive fundamentals happening. There are negatives in countries, in different places. There are negatives in some of our businesses. If you take a broad brush across, there's extremely positive things going on in the businesses.
That goes from, as Brian mentioned, on the leasing side in New York. As Brookfield Properties talked about the other day, Rick Clark mentioned that our leasing fundamentals are extremely positive. We think we'll have one of the best years we've had ever. The first quarter was, I think, one of the best quarters we've ever had. We're actually in the second stage of a fundamental recovery, and rents are actually going up in some places. That is an indication of just what I'd say that means for the broader business. It means that businesses are actually making decisions again. Two years ago, nobody was making any decisions. That's a dramatic thing from before. Secondly, we see in the retail business, which gives a broad spectrum of retail sales in America , which incidentally, about $50 billion of sales a year go through our shopping malls.
Those numbers have sequentially gone up every single month for 18 months, for 17 months. They hit $4.09 at the bottom in November of 2009. Every single month since, retail sales have been going up. That doesn't necessarily mean anything, but what it just means is that there's more confidence in the market and people are spending money. Retail sales plummeted in 2009 and are recovering. Commodities in Brazil and in Australia, where we have major operations, and in Canada to some extent, are driving enormous build-out of both natural gas, LNG plants in Western Australia, coal in Eastern Australia, oil sands in Western Canada, agricultural and oil developments in Brazil. All of those things are driving an amazing transformation of these emerging economies. That is all good for the world. I guess we see both in America and in the developed economies things getting better.
They're never going to be robust. These are generally low-growth economies, but they're getting better. In the emerging markets, we still see very positive fundamental movements of capital and growth within those businesses. We're extremely positive. Last one is just shipping numbers. Port shipments through the port facilities that we have are up very significantly in the last two years. That just means there's global movement of goods that wasn't occurring before, which just bodes well for the economic situation. All of those things, I'd say, generally lead us on that first point. While we don't have a view on macro-economic fundamentals at the grassroots level of the businesses, it gives us confidence that things are coming back. We do see it in the numbers. There's always a lag effect of financial results, but we clearly see it in the positive fundamentals that are occurring.
A second thing is just interest rates and currencies. We don't have strong views on either of these. They sort of sometimes match our businesses. What we try to do is take risk out of the business by doing things in the business related to them. I'd say on interest rates, our view has been that we're in an extremely low interest rate environment. This is fantastic for people that do business like us. We can make a lot of money at these interest rates. Even a few hundred basis points higher, 200 or 300 basis points higher, we can still make a lot of money. Our view is that rates are probably going up on the long end of the curve. It's a very steep curve today. While LIBOR is low, eventually, as the economy in United States recovers, you'll see interest rates on the low end come up.
Probably the back end will float up. As long as something bad doesn't occur, being inflation gets out of control. The U.S. government clearly has been extremely good in how they pulled us out of the mess. We expect that they will continue to do that. Our expectation is that interest rates will float up on the long end into the 5% - 6% range. If that occurs, our business still works really well. Despite that, what we're doing is using this environment to lock in as much financing, as Brian said, for as long as possible at these low rates because it just doesn't matter anymore. We shouldn't take the risk that something bad does occur and interest rates get out of control. That's generally our view on interest rates. On currencies, as you know, we have more than half of our business outside of the United States.
We're in three major countries. Their currencies have done extremely well over the past 36 months, and in particular, even over the last three to four months. That's benefited us a lot. We generally match fund in the debt in our countries to match the assets, but we're long those currencies. That's been a good thing for the corporation. The assets we have in Australia, Canada, Brazil have all been going up against the U.S. dollar, and that's added and will add more value to the company if that continues to occur. Our view, though, longer term, isn't to make a bearish bet on the U.S. dollar. This is an amazing economy, and we think eventually all of the macro-economic issues will be sorted out. Again, we're just at the grassroots level trying to make 12% or 15% returns. We don't make big currency leverage bets or anything like that.
All we're doing is just matching assets. Generally, we leave the currencies in the countries we are naturally only assets in. We're long a number of currencies outside the United States. Third, just on fundraising, and Brian mentioned it, I'd say that we have a number of funds in the market today. While it's never easy to raise money on these funds, it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. We think it's a very, very powerful thing for the company, and that's why we spend the time doing it. It's much easier than it was five years ago. It's certainly easier than it was 10 years ago. It's much easier than it was five years. I think we've finally hit an inflection point in our fundraising efforts with institutional clients, and that's a good thing for the company.
We think the scale that it gives us gives us a competitive advantage over many others that we compete against, and that adds value to the franchise. On organizational structure, often we're asked about the public companies we have and the different things within the business. Bottom line, I guess we're in the business of trying to maximize the return for the common shareholder of Brookfield Asset Management. We try to ensure that we don't take too much risk, and therefore we often compartmentalize our businesses to ensure that nothing ever affects the parent company, but also to give us maximum ability to attract clients who may just want to invest in one product. That's either public security holders or possibly institutional clients. They may not want to invest into a broad business like Brookfield Asset Management, but be invested in one area. We continuously do that.
I guess in last year, we simplified our office business to be just an office business. We simplified our residential business to just have it in one place. We continually will do that. Sometimes it's more complicated because we buy a company that has something in it, and it doesn't match what's there, and it takes us time to do it. Longer term, and I guess I'd say 10 years from now, what we hope to have is a major listed vehicle in each one of our areas where we operate and a large institutional entity beside it, which can invest capital for institutional clients. That's where we're headed. It takes time to do it, but we continuously work with that structure.
Because of the size of the investments we make and the type of assets we run, we feel that the G&A that we run and the business that we have and the platform we have can scale up very, very substantially and still operate within the systems that we have and the risk profile that we have in the company. Therefore, there is scalability to this business model versus if you did something that was extremely intensive and we were buying $3 million assets or something like that. Many of the assets we have are very large in nature. On acquisitions and expansion projects, I guess we feel extremely lucky. Brian mentioned the two acquisitions we made in 2008, early 2009, which are GGP and Babcock. We feel lucky to have got two amazing franchises at the bottom of the market.
We're currently focused on integrating these to grow organically, growing those and each of the businesses we have. There's an enormous amount of things to do within the businesses we have. On the outside, or I guess the next stage, we're spending a lot of time in Europe talking to and working with European companies that both have assets in Europe and in South America because they were the largest owners of European assets over the last, or buyers of South American assets over the last while. We're spending a lot of time both in infrastructure and real estate talking to a number of European entities, and we hope to be successful there.
In the property sector, I guess I would characterize it as for a number of years, other than a few exceptions that we've been involved in, many of the loan transactions didn't occur because either the owners had no reason to transact because they had no equity or their loan didn't come due because it was a five-year loan and it had five years to run. What's occurred now is that those five-year loans are running out. Secondly, values have inflated to the extent where the equity owner has something at risk. Therefore, they want to deal. We're seeing a much more significant number of things coming to our door that could have transacted two years ago but didn't and are now going to transact because values have come up to some degree.
What that means is that the acquisition, if you would have made them in 2008 or 2009, would have been much better. They're still very good if you believe that the situation is positive where you buy those assets, which we generally do. I guess that's where we focus on acquisition. We're focused on acquisitions today. On infrastructure, I guess I'd just say to the shareholders, we started in a renewable power business for a long, long time. Seven or eight years ago, we diversified into the infrastructure business. We're extremely pleased that we did that. We think that the infrastructure business for us probably will be 10 years from now the biggest business we have in the company.
The thing about infrastructure is that we have an enormous number of operating people in the businesses that we operate in, and not many others in the asset management space do it. Therefore, we have a competitive advantage in infrastructure versus there's many people that participate in real estate. Not that we won't continue to grow and don't have a great business in real estate. There's just less competition in infrastructure. The scale of the opportunities coming from both publicly traded companies that want to get rid of assets and from governments as they need capital to reorganize their own balance sheets, we think will be very significant. We are very positive on infrastructure and continue to be so. On General Growth , I would say, and Brian mentioned it, we're very fortunate, I think, to now have 40%, just under 40% position in General Growth .
We think it's a great business. Fundamentals are recovering. We hired a new CEO. He's trimming the portfolio and doing a number of things in the company. We think this company will continue to grow at very good returns coming out of the next five years, coming over the next five years. We are very pleased to be involved in General Growth and hope to help them in any way we can going forward. Lastly, I'll just talk about our common equity issue and then take any questions if there are any from people. We did an equity issue this year. We haven't issued shares since 1995 except once, which we bought most of them back afterwards in the market. When we merged in an investment, we just felt that it was an opportune time to do something.
While we gave away shares in part of our franchise, we think we got back more or less or roughly the same value. In addition, we got a platform that could be as valuable as what we gave away for our franchise. While it's probably slightly dilutive to the numbers up front, we think in the long term, it'll be just as valuable. It's something that probably is abnormal for us, but we felt it was the right thing to do. It does not mean anything about what we think of the common shares of this company and the growth over time. We're past that, and we now have a very significant position as a result of that in General Growth . Those were the eight items I thought I would talk about.
If there is anything else, I'd be happy to answer any questions that anybody in the crowd here has if they had any.
Yes, I have actually three questions. The first question was, of course, with the market, the shares of Brookfield Asset went way down. I wonder why the company didn't buy them back or what the consideration was in not buying them back. I don't know how low they went, but they went pretty low.
Want to ask all three first, or do you want me to answer them in a quick session? I'm writing them down.
All right. The second question is relating to a company.
I get to think more about them.
I'm not trying to stump you. The second question relates to Brookfield Properties or whatever the current title is. I don't know how much you own, but I know you own a large percentage. I wonder if you could fill us in on what's happening down in the World Financial Center area. The third question relates to Brookfield Infrastructure, which just reported its funds from operations up quite a bit. If you could talk a little bit about the future of that company, particularly with the Australian assets that they've taken over.
Thank you for those questions, and I'll try to do them all in order. You know, on our share price, we have, over the years, been a repurchaser of shares in the company. We view it as just another investment decision in the business. I'd say two things occurred. We were active in buying shares up until the end of 2008. In fact, I think we bought some shares, Brian's responsible for this program, at the lowest point that shares traded in the market. There was a point in time where we decided that there was going to be some amazing opportunities in the marketplace.
We probably, to take a leap forward in the business plan, as opposed to buying back what we had, there was probably this one moment in time where we could actually put capital into other things and probably enhance the value of the business way more than what we would do by buying back our own shares. There's no doubt that $12 or whatever they went to was an inexpensive price for Brookfield in hindsight. I think adding the Babcock assets to Brookfield Infrastructure and the GGP assets as a retail business and a number of other things we did rounded the company out in a way that will pay us possibly more value in the longer term than what the shares would have bought us by buying them back. Only time will tell.
If we made bad investments with those two when you look back 10 years from now, it would have been way better buying the stock back. I can't promise that that will be the case. I think it was a unique opportunity, which probably was unconventional at the time for us. Second, on Brookfield Properties, I don't think Rick Clark is here or I'd ask him to answer it, but we have a major investment in Lower Manhattan. I would characterize it this way. There's $20 billion or more than $20 billion being spent by the federal government of infrastructure money to redo the commutation transportation systems downtown, plus redo what was at the trade center, plus build the memorial, and plus support the rebuilding of the trade center, which has moved mountains, and amazing things have been accomplished there.
Three years from now, I think it will be seen as one of the most amazing transformations of a neighborhood ever occurred in an urban city anywhere in the world. We think it's going to be fantastic longer term. In the interim, it's still a little messy when tenants go down there, and we apologize to them all the time for that. We think it's going to be fantastic in 2013 and 2014, and we're very excited about that. If people haven't been down there, they should go and have a look at it. It's incredible what's gone on. We're positive about the future of Lower Manhattan. Tribeca and the residential neighborhoods that have developed down there have had a huge effect on it. A number of new tenants are moving downtown, which is just a change from the traditional financial services institutions.
The third item is on Brookfield Infrastructure, which you asked about Australia and what that means for the business. Brookfield Infrastructure, I think I stood at this annual meeting maybe two years ago and possibly three years ago. Time flies when you have a recession. I said that we spun Brookfield Infrastructure out. Yes, it had gone down, and we hadn't done much with it, but we hoped that one day we would be able to use it to transform the business into something in the future. That actually occurred, I think, in 2008, early 2009, by us being able to use it. I would say the only reason we were able to buy those Australian assets is because we had spun out that a year and a half beforehand.
The business today is now at a critical mass where it can grow and has a number of businesses and infrastructure. I think we have a business which will have great growth opportunities going forward. A lot of that is because of the things we picked up in that Australian acquisition. Australia as a country is doing extremely well. I think I was there last fall, and I think there's $200 billion or $250 billion - $300 billion of infrastructure projects being invested in Australia today and on the board to be invested. That's a massive amount of investment in a relatively small country. A lot of those aren't just perceived projects. They're getting built today. It's very positive for the country, and therefore that backs up our positive views on what's going to happen in the infrastructure space. Hope that answers your three questions.
Thank you.
Are there any other questions? Seeing no other questions, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank you for your participation today. We appreciate the comments we received from you on the intranet, by phone, to Katherine, to Andy Willis, to Brian, to myself, and others. I hope you found the meeting informative, and that brings us to the end of today's meeting, unless there is any other business, which I would look out and just see if anyone has any other business. If not, given there's no other business, I declare the meeting terminated. Thank you for attending and people are around if you wanted to speak to us. Thank you very much.