Jason Hernandez and Alexandra Cooley

Lending volumes surged in 2025 at both Nuveen Real Estate and Nuveen Green Capital (NGC) as the firms underwent leadership changes.

Nuveen Real Estate executed $4.8 billion of originations globally in 2025, up from $1.7 billion the year before. Global deployment was split roughly evenly between Nuveen’s value-add credit strategies and insurance capital with 61 percent of originations in the U.S. 

Jason Hernandez ascended to an expanded role in late 2025 when he moved from head of U.S. real estate debt to global head of commercial real estate debt. Hernandez said Nuven’s versatility with multiple platforms on a global scale distinguishes it in an increasingly crowded private credit real estate market.

“If you look at those who can offer insurance products, core-plus, value-add credit and C-PACE, there are probably a handful of people that can do it, and there’s an even smaller handful that can do it globally,” Hernandez said.

NGC also had a big year, nearly
doubling its C-PACE originations with $2.1 billion of volume compared to $1.2 billion in 2024.

The clean energy lending arm of Nuveen shattered its own previous record for a C-PACE loan with a $465 million debt package in December for Post Brothers’ office-to-residential development at 1825-1875 Connecticut Avenue Northwest in Washington, D.C.

The historic transaction was closed four months after NGC executed what was the largest C-PACE financing to date with a $290 million loan for Two Roads Development’s planned Pendry Hotel & Residences project in Downtown Tampa, Fla., in September 2025.

Alexandra Cooley took on an expanded role at NGC in October 2025 when she was promoted to CEO in addition to her chief investment officer position, after her longtime teammate Jessica Bailey was appointed to a newly created role as Nuveen’s head of global infrastructure. Cooley said NGC is poised for further growth in 2026 after a record-breaking 2025, where borrowers got more behind C-PACE as a financing source to make deals pencil.

“We had a lot of really exciting things happening in 2025 with the institutionalization of the C-PACE product and people really understanding how it could help projects come to fruition and senior lenders getting a lot more comfortable with it,” Cooley said. “We were really able to expand what C-PACE could do last year and expanded into new markets and really work with some of the highest quality sponsors out there.”