Mike Sales and Chad Phillips

The first year of Chad Phillips’s new leadership post at Nuveen Real Estate saw plenty of green shoots for the investment manager.

Phillips, who assumed the global head of real estate position on April 1, 2025, oversaw a successful fundraising year for Nuveen Real Estate while also strategically deploying plenty of capital. The fourth quarter of 2025 marked Nuveen Real Estate’s seventh consecutive quarterly performance with positive returns, and Phillips sees the platform well positioned to extend that momentum into 2026.

“We’ve hit the ground running in a really, really seamless situation from a leadership perspective, and we have been gaining market share,” Phillips said. “Momentum is building for real estate as investors are starting to come back, and we’ve been very active both in fundraising and deployment, and will continue to be.”

Nuveen Real Estate closed its U.S. Strategic Debt Fund in December with $650 million in total equity commitments, exceeding its initial target of $500 million. It marked Nuveen’s first closed-end fund in the commercial real estate credit space focused on the U.S.

In July 2025, the global real estate investment manager also announced $785 million of new capital commitments raised for its Nuveen C-PACE Lending Fund III. The fundraise underscores the success of its Nuveen Green Capital arm, which originated $2.1 billion of Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy loans in 2025, nearly double its 2024 total.

On the equity front, Nuveen Real Estate generated $320 million of new capital for its U.S. Cities Retail Fund, an open-ended vehicle that will target grocery-anchored properties.

Nuveen Real Estate is poised for further growth in 2026 after Nuveen announced an agreement in February to acquire British investment manager Schroders. The deal, which is slated to close in the fourth quarter pending regulatory approvals, would boost Nuveen Real Estate’s assets under management to $28.1 billion.

“That will increase the size of Nuveen, full stop, and over time increase the size of the real estate business,” CEO Mike Sales said. “That will be pretty significant in terms of the footprint.”