Nadir Settles (left), Mike Sales (top right), Carly Tripp, (bottom left) of Nuveen.
Mike Sales, Carly Tripp and Nadir Settles
CEO; Global Chief Investment Officer and Head of Investments; Managing Director and New York Regional Head at Nuveen Real Estate
Last year's rank: 22
While Nuveen — a subsidiary of TIAA — invested $1.6 billion around New York in the past year, it’s done plenty of splashy deals with Taconic recently.
In December, the pair paid $55 million for a 296,000-square-foot industrial asset in Morristown, N.J., marking Taconic’s first entrance into the industrial market. And, in April, the partners nabbed a $79 million debt package to refinance their Upper East Side development site at 309 East 94th Street and 324 East 95th Street, where they’re still figuring out exactly what they’ll develop.
To continue their relationship, the duo closed on a $260 million fund in July 2021 to pick up all types of real estate around New York, hoping to create a $1 billion portfolio when all is said and done.
And, of course, there’s the 400,000-square-foot life sciences project they’re working on at 125 West End Avenue, which they expect to finish in 2023. In further proof of how red hot the life sciences market is, they’re in talks to lease it to a single user. “It was unexpected,” Nadir Settles said.
“We thought we were going to lease it up to multiple tenants.”
Nuveen has a lot more going on aside from these Taconic-involved projects. In the past year, its investments around New York had a gross asset value of about $1 billion. The firm has more than $152 billion in assets under management around the world and deployed $13.8 billion in the United States this past year.
“We had the strongest year that we’ve ever had in transaction deployment,” Carly Tripp said.
Outside of New York, the firm has targeted industrial, office, storage facilities and
single-family rentals, and has started to make “tactical” investments in some retail projects near offices, Tripp said.
This May, the firm launched a global impact investing effort to support affordable and sustainable housing, with the goal to have up to $15 billion in real estate under management by 2026 and make Nuveen’s portfolio net carbon zero by 2040.
“That’s just a massively important focus for not only our organization, but for our parent organization,” Tripp said. “We think we can really start to effectuate change and social mobility through the built world.”
