Nuveen Real Estate makes senior hires to lead its Strategic Transactions team in Europe

Nuveen Real Estate, one of the largest real estate investment managers in the world with $147 billion of assets under management¹, has appointed Batih Van Leer and Stefano Rubini as Managing Directors and Co-Heads of its Strategic Transactions team in Europe.

The new appointments align with Nuveen Real Estate’s focus on sourcing and executing high yield investment opportunities across all real estate sectors, and will see Batih and Stefano working in partnership with Nuveen’s existing vertically integrated sector specialist teams across Europe. They will also oversee Nuveen’s European value add series, including capital raising and deployment for an upcoming second strategy, working with Fund Manager David Pearce.

Batih and Stefano will join Nuveen Real Estate’s Senior Leadership Team, which oversees the management of the European real estate team’s overall business. They will both be based in the firm’s European Head Office in London from January.

Batih van Leer joins Nuveen after nearly a decade at Ares. Prior to this, he held roles at CBRE Investment Management focused on real estate acquisitions and asset management, and with Savills in the Netherlands.

Stefano Rubini joins after he spent the last three years at Ares, and prior to this spent six years at Partners Group in Switzerland and the UK. Stefano began his career in investment banking and project finance at UniCredit in Italy.

Together they have led investments across the UK, Western and Southern Europe as well as the Nordics, in all major sectors, responsible for the sourcing, execution and management of a wide variety of real estate (related) transactions including asset and platform recapitalizations, JV-structuring and strategic co-investments across common and preferred equity positions.

Randy Giraldo, Head of Europe at Nuveen Real Estate, said: “The recruitment of Batih and Stefano to Nuveen’s Senior Leadership Team enhances our existing commitment to building a best-in-class European focused, diversified value add series. These appointments will provide senior strategic resource on key transactions, asset management oversight and strategy execution. Through this investment we are underlining our commitment to executing high-yielding, structured deals that require us to move quickly and provide the very best performance outcomes for clients. 2025 will be an important year for value add transactions and we want our clients to be in the best possible position to benefit from those opportunities.”