Jack Gay and Jason Hernandez
Managing Director, Global Head of Commercial Real Estate Debt; Managing Director, Head of Originations at Nuveen Real Estate
Last year's rank: 46
Nuveen Real Estate weathered the storm of last year and deployed about $4.8 billion in debt on a variety of asset classes across its fixed-rate and bridge-lending businesses in the U.S.
Taking a long-term view on its credit investments, while being nimble enough to take advantage of pockets of short-term illiquidity in the market as lenders of other stripes were on the sidelines helped put “more wind at our backs than we expected,” Jason Hernandez said. “Today, we’re trying to hire seven people to our team.”
“Looking back on the past year, we’re in a much better position than we thought we’d be,” he added. “Our thought was to take a long-term view, stay cool and calm, and not overreact.”
The U.S. debt team worked across multifamily, industrial and alternative asset classes, like self-storage and life sciences, out of its core, fixed-rate lending bucket, while focusing on the office and multifamily segments via its bridge-lending business.
Nuveen’s U.S. debt business was able to gain market share in the bridge-lending space last year during the height of the pandemic, which Hernandez said “paid dividends as the markets have begun to stabilize and liquidity has returned.”
Hernandez said his team saw a bevy of opportunities in the Sun Belt region, which presented some of the first markets to emerge from pandemic-related lockdowns. But Nuveen is starting to see more chances emerge on the West Coast as the vaccination surge continues.
Toward the end of 2020, it closed on a $432 million loan, as part of a larger package with PGIM Real Estate Finance that financed Stockbridge and the National Pension Service of Korea’s acquisition of a massive portfolio of industrial assets spread throughout the country. “That industrial portfolio would’ve been a bank deal, and we did a debt fund execution,” Hernandez said. “The sponsor had to transact because the deal was under contract.”
It also provided $114 million to Rubenstein Partners to refinance its Pennant Park office development in Atlanta in what was a bridge-to-sale play.
“We didn’t want to take huge risks in office space,” Hernandez said, adding that because of the pandemic, Rubenstein “missed the window to sell the asset, and wanted to refinance existing debt. There was no business plan risk.” Nuveen also extended a $77 million loan to Ares Management and Monument Realty to acquire a D.C. office property called the Liberty Building, which will undergo a value-add repositioning.
Hernandez added that Nuveen, throughout the year, continued “following liquidity from industrial and multifamily to office. Light value-add multifamily is still attractive. A lot of the deals [we closed] could have been bank deals.”—M.B.
