Thank you for the excellent questions and ones that we wrestle with all the time.
I think it's really interesting. If you look at the real estate portfolio and the real estate industry, there are certain parts of it that have really benefited in some ways from the pandemic. For example, I hesitate to say this seeing as I was cut off on another go, but data centres and broadband have been an area that has really benefited. Anything involved with e-commerce and home delivery and logistics has really benefited. Those areas are booming. At the other end of the spectrum, you have hotels and hospitality and also shopping malls, and they've been really hard hit. In the middle you have offices, which I'll come back to.
On the hospitality side, we have very little exposure to hospitality. We don't invest in hotels and the equity of hotels. We've had that as an investment strategy for many years. We never liked hospitality as an area to invest in.
Shopping malls we do have exposure to in Canada, North America and Europe and around the world, and they have been hard hit. We tend to invest with very strong partners and in what we think are the destination malls rather than smaller malls, but I would say for the North American shopping mall industry that this is going to be a really tough time if there is going to be a requirement for social distancing rather than the best strategy, which is to try to get as many people through the malls as possible.
In addition, arguably in North America, shopping malls have been very overbuilt. By some estimates there are four times the number of malls that are needed in the U.S., so it was always an expectation that these were going to decline. This has probably accelerated that decline as more people have gone to e-commerce rather than going to a physical store. That's probably going to accelerate this transition to the use of those shopping malls towards other things, such as performance centres or entertainment centres.
On offices, I'd say that it's interesting. The jury is out among smart people right now. On the one hand, as long as there is a requirement for social distancing, then arguably people are going to need bigger floor plates if you can get the people into the offices. On the other hand, yes, the work from home environment generally has been one that most companies in the knowledge industries have been able to cope with and it has worked, so there is probably going to be some stickiness in not needing people to commute all the time and in their being able to work remotely and work from different centres. I personally hope that does stick, to some extent.
That being said, it's still not clear what human behaviour will revert to. Generally, when we went through what was a much shorter episode of SARS back in the day, which a number of the committee members will remember, there was a lot of talk back then about people working remotely permanently. It didn't happen, so it's possible that people will revert to the behaviour of wanting to work together in teams, seeing each other and being physically close to each other. It's not clear yet. We are watching that behaviour very carefully.
Sorry, I didn't mention infrastructure. We don't own any airports, and that's not necessarily from a strategy point of view. I wouldn't like to say that we were really smart in not owning airports; we couldn't find one that we could buy at what we thought was a reasonable price. We were consistently outbid over the last 10 or 12 years around the world on airports, so we have zero airports in our infrastructure portfolio.
We do have other assets, which I'd be happy to talk about, some of which have been impacted and others of which have been less impacted.