US insurers have committed more than £25 billion to infrastructure projects in the US alone. CRE debt has been part of that insurance investment, with large players like Guardian, Friends Life and Standard Life publicly entering into sizeable CRE debt mandates in recent years. But the rising attractiveness of CRE debt might be diminishing: spreads have narrowed over the last 18 months (illustrated in figure 1) as insurers, among other investors, jump in to get their slice of rare, prime commercial property debt. (The reduction in volume of CRE loan books in the UK market is shown in figure 2). In this paper, we consider the current appeal of CRE as an illiquid asset class to back insurance liabilities.