Any baseball fans reading this have likely seen the name Nuveen quite a bit. The asset manager has had a giant sign in the left field of Wrigley Field in Chicago and Oracle Park in San Francisco since 2016 and 2017, respectively. Any real estate fans reading this will probably have seen the name Nuveen quite a bit as well. They have become one of the most active real estate owners over the last few decades. How they have grown into such a recognizable real estate company has a lot to do with the company’s long history of weathering downturns, its institutional ownership, and its investment strategy.

Nuveen was founded way back in 1898 by John Nuveen, who emigrated from Germany to Chicago when he was two. At the time, it first specialized in marketing municipal bonds issued by Midwestern towns. The company’s success selling government bonds during the Great Depression and handling European reconstruction debt for the Marshall Plan helped it become one of the leaders in public finance.

But the company hit some bumps along the road; the bond route of 1969 hit the company hard, and it ended up being sold to Investor’s Diversified Services. After changing hands a few more times until, after the global financial crisis in 2008, it merged with its now parent company TIAA, the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, a private provider of financial retirement services. Now it has a huge portfolio of over $1.1 trillion in assets, $128 billion of which are in real estate.

One of the themes of Nuveen’s investments throughout its history has been finding ways to avoid market volatility. Over the past few decades, that has meant investing heavily in assets that traditionally do well in periods of high inflation. Nuveen has become the world’s largest manager of global farmland, for example.

They have also shaped their traditional real estate portfolio to be resilient against inflation, selling off some of their riskier U.S. office assets. The CEO of Nuveen has said that this push towards lower volatility and higher yield has helped them attract investment as the markets have suffered from higher interest rates, “the puck came to us,” he said in an interview.

Nuveen’s outlook is that real estate will continue to be a good investment, but the best way to invest will depend heavily on the specific market. They generally see growth in Asia, which has led them to make some big bets on offices in places like Singapore. In places where office properties are struggling more, like Northern Europe, Nuveen has pursued other asset types like self-storage and single-family build to rent.

No one likes volatility, but when times are good and returns are high, most investors tend to prefer high-yield assets over stable ones. Nuveen’s controlled, conservative approach to real estate, likely mandated by its risk-averse parent company, has put it in a good position to attract more investment in volatile times. Even if we hit a soft landing like Nuveen’s CEO seems to think, there are plenty of risk factors to consider: an upcoming Presidential election, a prolonged war in Eastern Europe, and escalating tension in the Middle East. All of this will have investors thinking more than ever about reducing volatility, which would only further help the company that has built an array of investment options around that very concept.

🐕 Pile on: One of the NAR commission copycat lawsuits in Northern California has just added five new defendants, including Vanguard Properties, Windermere, and Twin Oaks Real Estate.

💳 Tax credit: A proposed change to the tax bill would aim to spur affordable housing development by allowing states to expand their Low Income Housing Tax Credits from 9 to up to 12.5 percent.