Today, the housing market has pulled back quite a bit, I think it’s somewhere in the range of 20% pullback from the prior year. So I’d say housing is definitely weaker in the U.K. What’s great about this business is the fact that even though housing has pulled back pretty dramatically, this is one year, our connection sales being stalled will in fact, be higher than what they were last year, we’ll have another record year of installations. And we have a backlog of housing connections that represents about 70 years of our annual connections. So we have a big, big backlog. And I think the only other thing I’d mentioned, but the housing is, even though it’s been down this year, the amount of housing deficit that exists in the market is pretty substantial.
Typically, there’s about 200,000 plus new homes built in the U.K. every year, and the government has had a long-term ambition to see that grow to over 300,000. And so there’s always lots of programs to encourage it. And like most countries, including Canada, the need for housing is pretty dramatic. So we expect, while there’s a pullback this year in housing starts, that will rebound pretty quickly. Just maybe just a couple of final comments on, you asked about the business and our thoughts on it. We like this business, because it basically is a perpetual asset base with inflation linked, and highly diversified regulated cash flows. And it’s been growing at about 20% per annum over the past 10 years. So the growth in the businesses is tremendous.
We do have many investors in the fund. Most of them are on the debt side, we’ve issued about $2 billion of investment grade debt into the U.S. markets. And it’s a regular issue, we’re into the debt markets and has a very strong following. And we also have a institutional investor who’s been alongside us for the whole time for about 10 years, a big European institution who owns 20% of the company. And they have seen growth in the company as have we. And this is a company that today we don’t typically talk about value but is a very meaningful value to us. We prepare valuations for them each year as we do for many of our other institutional investors. And to give you a sense, a big four accounting firm put a value on this business at over £3.1 billion, which is almost U.S.$4 billion.
So a very sizable company, very successful. And one that I hope we keep for a long, long time.
Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Devin Dodge from BMO Capital Markets. Your question, please.
Devin Dodge: Yes. Good morning. So we’ve been getting questions from investors on your ability to recycle capital in this type of market? I know you talked about it in the Investor Day, as well as in the prepared remarks earlier. But should we expect a bit of a low on monetization into long-term interest rate stabilize? And then, maybe in the general sense, where are you seeing the most interest from potential buyers?
Sam Pollock: Hi, there. So, obviously, it’s hard to predict exactly what the market will look like. But what I would say, though, is that, we are bringing, we will bring to market those businesses that we think will be highly sought after, what I can say is that on the businesses that we’ve already launched processes, at the moment, and it’s obvious, early days, the number of interested parties looking at it is substantial. So there is lots of investors out there looking for high-quality businesses, that that’s not stopped, and even over the last while has been relatively robust. And we still see large transactions, in fact, been done. I think, in this market environment, if I had to say where the sweet spot is probably more mid-market transactions and large-scale transactions.
