Nuveen, the investment manager of retirement services giant Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, has named a new global head of its real estate investment arm.
The leadership change comes as Nuveen said it expects 2025 to be “a good vintage for real estate investment.”
Chad Phillips, a near-25-year industry veteran who joined Nuveen in 2019, will serve as the global head of Nuveen real estate, effective immediately, Nuveen said. He succeeds Chris McGibbon, a company veteran for nearly 25 years who decided to retire, Nuveen said Monday in a statement.
Phillips, whose career history included serving as a portfolio manager and managing director at Guggenheim Real Estate, will be responsible for $141 billion in assets under management of commercial real estate equity and debt investments covering 22 countries globally, Nuveen said, adding he also will chair the Nuveen Real Estate global executive leadership team that oversees the platform’s strategic initiatives.
Phillips is based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Besides Charlotte, Nuveen, based in Chicago, has major presence also in New York, where TIAA is based, a company spokesperson told CoStar News.
Most recently, Phillips led a global team that focuses on workplace, healthcare, retail, and mixed-use investments. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from Davidson College and a master’s degree in real estate from Georgetown University.
The change at the helm comes as Nuveen said in a study that real estate values have “stabilized” while “the dearth of new construction activity bodes well for medium-term fundamentals.”
“The painful reset of private real estate seems to be in the rearview mirror,” Nuveen said in the study. “After falling 16.2% from the peak, global real estate values are showing signs of stabilizing, and total returns have ticked positive.”
McGibbon, also based in Charlotte, will remain with the firm until June 30 to ensure a smooth transition, Nuveen said. McGibbon, after about a quarter century with TIAA and Nuveen, has helped to expand and transform Nuveen as a top five global real estate player by asset size under management, Nuveen’s Chief Executive Officer of Real Assets Mike Sales said.
For instance, Nuveen in 2023 bought a 12,000-unit affordable-housing portfolio that took its affordable housing properties to $6.4 billion, a company spokesperson told CoStar News.
Institutional investor interest in real estate continues to grow as private infrastructure and private real estate saw the biggest year-over-year increases in the percent of investors planning to increase allocations this year, according to a Nuveen survey of institutional investors.