Jason Hernandez, Alexandra Cooley and Jessica Bailey

Nuveen Green Capital (NGC) continued its long-standing role as a market leader for Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) loans in 2025.

The clean energy lending arm of Nuveen originated more than $1.2 billion in C-PACE loans, up from $800 million a year earlier, and accounted for nearly half of the C-PACE market share nationally. NGC, which closed the commercial real estate industry’s first rated C-PACE securitization in 2017, has pioneered an industry that is nearing the $10 billion threshold.

“What’s underpinned a lot of our growth recently has been these shocks to the commercial real estate market with everything from COVID to the rapid run-up in interest rates,” said Alexandra “Ali” Cooley, who co-founded NGC in 2015 with Jessica Bailey when the firm was known as Greenworks Lending. “C-PACE has been able to fill the gaps in the commercial real estate financing space to moderate the impacts of those shocks.”

Bailey and Cooley paved the way for even more C-PACE volume growth in 2024 by advocating behind the scenes for New York City’s eventual expansion of its C-PACE program last August, expanding the projects eligible for these loans to include gut rehabilitations in addition to renovations. The duo worked closely with the New York State Research and Development Authority and with City Hall to create new guidelines, marking an extension of their long run of education outreach for the C-PACE industry going back to when they worked at the Connecticut Green Bank. 

“The thing that really differentiates Nuveen Green Capital from some other players in the C-PACE space is our public sector roots,” Bailey said. “What that has done is it’s given us not only a deep ability to know what works from a policy perspective to scale private capital, but a deep level of credibility with the public sector, who is a key partner to us.”

NGC closed its largest deal in its 10-year history in late 2024 with a $220 million C-PACE loan for the recapitalization of developer Jay Paul Company’s newly completed 19-story office building at 200 Park Avenue in Downtown San Jose. 

Nuveen Real Estate was also active in 2024 with $1.7 billion of originations focused heavily on floating-rate transitional loans. The Nuveen debt platform devoted much of the year to capital raising for its Strategic Debt Fund (SDF) while seeking deployment opportunities in core and core-plus assets largely in the housing and logistics sectors. 

The SDF, a value-add credit fund, has raised $500 million of equity thus far and will likely end up in the $600 million range. Jason Hernandez, who has been head of Nuveen Real Estate’s U.S. debt business since 2021, said there are advantages in a dislocated market to raising smaller to medium-size funds. 

“It’s much easier to raise a billion-dollar fund and deploy that over two or three years versus to raise a $500 million deployed over 18 months and then have to go back and do it again,” Hernandez said. “But we think it gives you much more focus on your strategy, and it aligns with market opportunity because liquidity comes in and out of markets a lot quicker than it used to. So we want to make sure that we’re being responsive to that.”