By The Time It Gets To IC, It's Too Late
The Future We Build, A Brave Ideas network affiliated show featuring Alex Edds
In this episode of The Future We Build, host Alex Edds sits down with Abigail Dean is Head of Strategic Insights at Nuveen to discuss how to get new initiatives to land with investment committees.
The Future We Build - Season 1, Episode 7
Abigail Dean is Head of Strategic Insights at Nuveen, one of the largest real estate investment managers in the world.
Her role is unusual: sustainability doesn’t sit in a silo at Nuveen,
it lives alongside research and proptech under a single team, deliberately designed to give a more unified view of what’s actually driving real estate value.
Abigail came up through sustainability at JLL before taking on this broader remit, and that journey — from specialist to strategic integrator — shapes everything she talks about in this conversation.
The central question Alex and Abigail wrestle with is one that every sustainability leader in investment management will recognise:
“How do you make this stuff land?”
Not just at the investment committee — that, Abigail argues, is too late — but embedded into deal sourcing, underwriting, due diligence, and asset management from day one.
They get into the mechanics:
how voting rights at IC actually create accountability upstream,
why having ex-asset managers inside the sustainability team changes everything
how Nuveen is navigating the anti-ESG noise from the US without changing what they actually do.
They also go somewhere most episodes don’t:
the housing crisis
the role of private capital in affordablehousing
the data problem that Abigail — after 20 years in the industry — still finds staggering.
If you’re a sustainability professional, an investment manager, or anyone trying to understand how institutional capital is actually making decisions right now, this one’s worth your time.
Key Timestamps
• [00:01:00] Alex introduces Abigail and her unusual role: sustainability, research, and PropTech under one team at Nuveen
[00:03:00] Abigail explains the logic — why those three disciplines need to talk to each other rather than operate in parallel
[00:04:00] How mega trends, demographic shifts, and the energy transition are interconnected — and why siloed thinking gets the wrong answer
[00:07:00] Nuveen’s scope beyond real estate: infrastructure and natural capital, and what cross-asset collaboration on strategic insights looks like
[00:08:00] How sustainability and research feed into the investment committee — separate votes, shared process, and why that distinction matters
[00:10:00] Why the IC vote is too late: the real work happens at pre-IC, underwriting, and due diligence — and what that looks like in practice
[00:12:00] The debate: should sustainability sit on the IC? Abigail and Alex disagree, and both have a point
[00:15:00] How Nuveen’s sustainability team is structured — and the shift from roughly 50/50 reporting vs. strategy to two-thirds execution and client engagement
[00:16:00] Why hiring ex-asset managers into the sustainability team was a game-changer for integration and credibility with the investment side
[00:20:00] The anti-ESG backlash in the US: how serious is it, and how Nuveen is navigating it without changing what they actually do
[00:21:00] Reframing sustainability as building efficiency: why every investor agrees with it when you strip away the labels
[00:24:00] Tracking corporate SBTi commitments — still rising — and why US city-level regulations like Local Law 97 may actually have more teeth than European equivalents
[00:27:00] The housing crisis and private capital: is housing an asset class, should it be, and what role can institutional investors actually play?
[00:29:00] What government needs to do to unlock private capital for affordable housing — land contributions, de-risking, and unblocking planning
[00:33:00] What problem are you trying to solve? Abigail names data transparency as the issue she still finds staggering after two decades
[00:37:00] Is the green premium real — and does it roll out from prime to secondary markets, or does it stay confined to institutional-grade assets?
[00:40:00] If you could change one thing: tackling the long tail of buildings with a combination of regulation, cheap finance, and support — not just compliance burden
Organisations Mentioned
Nuveen
JLL
LaSalle Investment Management
GRESB
Better Buildings Partnership (BBP)
UK Green Building Council (UKGBC)
CBRE IM
Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi)
SFDR
Energy Star (US)
NABERS (Australia)
Green (Global Real Estate Engagement Network)
DeepKi
CRREM
Local Law 97 (New York City)
DCCS (Washington DC)
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