NEW YORK CITY—Joining a field of institutional heavyweights that already includes Blackstone and Starwood Capital Group, TIAA'S Nuveen LLC plans to raise up to $5 billion with an initial public offering for its non-traded REIT. The newly organized Nuveen Global Cities REIT filed a registration statement with the SEC just before the Christmas holiday weekend; it will be externally advised by a TH Real Estate affiliate.
“Our objective is to bring TH Real Estate's leading real estate investment platform with an institutional fee structure to the public, non-listed REIT industry,” according to the Nuveen REIT's registration statement. “We will seek to build a diversified portfolio of high quality, stabilized, income-orientated commercial real estate with good fundamentals located in or around certain global cities that have been identified, through TH Real Estate's research and filtering process, for their resilience, structural performance potential and ability to deliver an attractive and stable distribution yield.”
That filtering process winnowed down what TH Real Estate believes are the top 2% of global markets for “resilience and long-term structural growth” from more than 4,000 cities it considered. A global markets-focused approach, according to Nuveen's SEC filing, provides enhance diversification with a degree of protection against domestic market correction, offers exposure to a broader universe of assets and opportunities and delivers a higher risk-adjusted return.
“TH Real Estate considers scale, transparency, political and economic stability and 'megatrends' as part of the filtering process,” according to the Nuveen REIT registration statement. “It has identified five global megatrends that it believes will impact future demand for real estate: urbanization, the rising middle classes, aging populations, technology and the shift of economic power from the West to the East.”
Although short-term performance of real estate is “likely to continue to be materially impacted by economic cycles, over a longer period, performance will be influenced by the impact of such megatrends,” according to the registration statement. “Consequently, understanding long-term structural trends will be key to value preservation and growth.”
TH Real Estate believes the impact of these megatrends will be “much more pronounced at the individual city level, as opposed to a country level,” Nuveen Global Cities REIT says in its SEC filing. “This approach is consistent with the way in which tenants and residents are perceived to select rental properties. A cities-focused approach may also help ensure that compelling city-level opportunities are not overlooked due to negative country-level perception.”
To date, the REIT has made two acquisitions totaling more than $70 million, according to its SEC filing. The first was Kirkland Crossing, a 266-unit apartment property in the Chicago suburb of Aurora, IL, followed by a 264,981-square-foot industrial property in Phoenix. Both took place earlier this month.
Citing a report from Robert A. Stanger & Co., CoStar Group reported Tuesday that non-traded REITs were expected to end 2017 with a total of $4.2 billion in fundraising, a decline of nearly 79% from the sector's 2013 peak of $19.6 billion. However, Stanger projects that non-traded REIT fundraising will increase by more than a third to $5.6 billion in 2018, due mainly to the number of institutional players entering the space, CoStar reported.
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