Chad Phillips

Since ascending to the role of global head at Nuveen Real Estate in 2025, Chad Phillips has been making giant plays in grocery-anchored retail and even steered the company’s acquisition of a British asset management firm for $13.5 billion.

In 2025, just prior to Phillips taking over for Chris McGibbon, Nuveen raised $320 million in new capital from institutional investors for its U.S. Cities Retail Fund as part of a larger, $8 billion retail strategy that mostly hinges on grocery offerings.

By March 2026, Nuveen, the investment arm of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America-College Retirement Equities Fund, better known as TIAA, announced that the Cities Retail Fund had reached $330 million, with $250 million of that coming from the Australian profit-to-member retirement savings fund Retail Employees Superannuation Trust.

In February, Nuveen also acquired asset manager Schroders for $13.5 billion, essentially bringing an end to the Schroder family’s control over the 222-year-old business and resulting in a 29 percent bump in stock appreciation for Schroders shareholders.

The wheeling and dealing at Nuveen since Phillips took command shouldn’t be too surprising with his track record.

Phillips has been with Nuveen since 2019, most recently as global head of health care, office, retail and mixed-use, where he oversaw a team of 100 people and $50 billion in assets. The firm then had $105 billion invested in U.S. real estate and another $33 billion in Europe and Asia as of July 2025.

Since joining Nuveen, Phillips put the certainty of a real estate veteran to use.

“I was originally hired to run one of our resilient series open-ended funds, and brought on as portfolio manager, where I was put in charge of launching a core, open-ended office fund,” Phillips told Commercial Observer in 2025. “At the time, I had high conviction in alternatives, so I put my thumbprint on the fund and said, ‘Why don’t we make it more of a medical office fund? It’s a little more stable with higher cash flows.’”

Before long, Phillips was running funds investing in office, health care and retail, and it snowballed from there.