Nuveen has raised more than $1bn at first close for its fourth C-PACE lending fund, taking the series past $3bn since 2023. Insurers led the demand.
Nuveen and its commercial real estate financing arm, Nuveen Green Capital, announced the first close of Nuveen CPACE Lending Fund IV on 25 August. The fund lends against energy efficiency, water efficiency and climate resilience upgrades to commercial buildings.
C-PACE, or Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy, is a state-level public-private programme. Owners and developers borrow long-term private capital and repay through an assessment on the property tax bill. That structure gives it a cost advantage over mezzanine debt and equity, which is why sponsors keep returning to it.
Insurers are driving the demand
Nuveen said insurers led the raise. Joseph Pursley, Nuveen’s head of insurance for the Americas, said life insurers continue to prioritise longer duration, investment grade, asset-backed securities with attractive risk-adjusted returns.
“The demand we’re seeing for Fund IV, including new insurance LPs, reinforces that this is becoming a durable, core allocation for insurance portfolios rather than a one-off commitment,” Pursley said.
Nuveen’s 2026 EQuilibrium survey found 46 per cent of North American insurers plan to increase private fixed income allocations over the next two years. Of those, 53 per cent named private asset-backed securities such as C-PACE as a target.
A widening addressable market
Nuveen Green Capital was founded in 2015 and acquired by Nuveen in 2021, when it traded as Greenworks. It has since originated more than $6bn in C-PACE financings and now manages over $6bn in assets. Origination volume grew 73 per cent year on year.
C-PACE now operates in 39 states plus the District of Columbia, and the market widens as more states pass enabling legislation. Deal sizes in 2025 ranged from $5m to transactions in the hundreds of millions, including The Geneva, an office-to-residential conversion in Washington, DC, which Nuveen describes as the largest C-PACE financing to date.
Alexandra Cooley, chief executive and chief investment officer of Nuveen Green Capital, said investors have backed the strategy across four vintages “because the fundamentals remain steady throughout variable market cycles”.
Why buildings need the capital
Buildings retrofit remains one of the harder parts of the transition to finance. The work is diffuse, payback periods run long, and the savings accrue to whoever occupies the building rather than whoever pays for the upgrade. C-PACE answers that by attaching repayment to the property itself.
Nuveen manages over $1.4 trillion in assets overall, so the fund is small in that context. Its significance sits in the asset class rather than the balance sheet.
