Mike Sales and Nadir Settles

Nadir Settles’s interest in real estate came from traveling around New York City when he was growing up in the South Bronx not far from Yankee Stadium and attending St. John’s University in Queens. “I was always very interested in who owns these buildings and how they operated,” he said. 

His colleague Mike Sales got into real estate when his father, who was a surgeon, became friends with a real estate executive whose life he saved. He didn’t know what he wanted to do in college and realized that his father’s patient enjoyed his work in investment trusts, so he decided to explore that type of business.

Both ended up at Nuveen through different paths. Settles began working at TIAA in New York in 2011 while Sales was a manager at Henderson Global Investors before assisting with a merger with TIAA in 2014. When TIAA acquired Nuveen in 2015, Sales was tapped to lead its real assets investment business, while Settles would run its global impact investing team that includes its affordable housing stock. 

Both have since helped grow Nuveen’s real assets business to $170 billion with 27 offices worldwide. The firm recently sold a 3.7 million-square-foot portfolio of offices in eight U.S. cities for $850 million, and completed a 1 million-square-foot development in London that is 95 percent pre-leased.

But Nuveen’s most tangible effect on New York specifically has been its partnership with the New York City Housing Authority to finance the renovation of thousands of dilapidated units. “They awarded it to a lot of developers, but only certain developers are entrusted,” Settles said. “You come in and rehab the property, and operate them in an efficient way for dignified living.”

This year Nuveen executives have been warily following the Trump administration’s trade war, which has caused the price of wood and other natural materials to turn volatile. “We have forests all over the world that produce hardwood and softwood,” Sales said. “It’s not something we can get out of, it’s something we’re continually selling.”