NAB Foundation Launches $50 Million Impact Fund with Focus on Housing and Climate
With $25 million already committed, the new Impact Investment Fund aims to deliver both social outcomes and risk-adjusted financial returns, starting with affordable housing.
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The NAB Foundation has unveiled a new $50 million Impact Investment Fund (IIF), which targets social and environmental outcomes alongside financial performance. Affordable housing is among its top priorities.
Launched at the Asia Pacific Impact Investment Summit in Sydney on Wednesday, the fund has already allocated $25 million of its capital, with $10 million deployed and a further $25 million expected by October 2026.
Speaking at the launch, NAB Group Executive and JBWere Chair Cathryn Carver said the fund reflected NAB’s broader ambition to create long-term value for both communities and investors.
“Directing capital to aligned impact investments opens up new ways for the Foundation to create positive and lasting change,” said Carver. “The NAB Foundation is already supporting crucial community initiatives through up to $6 million in grants annually, and this fund adds another layer of strategic impact.”
The fund will be managed by JBWere, NAB’s wealth management arm, and will focus on investments aligned with three key pillars: Indigenous economic advancement, social and affordable housing, and climate transition. The initiative is part of the Foundation’s broader $170 million corpus and marks a deliberate shift into outcomes-driven capital deployment.
JBWere CEO Michael Saadie said the firm is seeing a significant uptick in clients seeking performance with purpose.
“Impact investing is a growing area of focus for those looking to invest effectively for performance and purpose,” said Saadie. “We’re proud to partner with the NAB Foundation, alongside hundreds of other purpose-driven clients.”
To oversee the fund’s governance, a specialist Investment Committee has been formed, chaired by Ben Smith, Head of Impact Investing at the Paul Ramsay Foundation. Smith said the committee is especially encouraged by NAB’s appetite to invest across the risk-return spectrum to unlock high-impact opportunities.
“The Committee is excited by the potential of the Fund, especially with NAB Foundation’s willingness to invest across the risk/return spectrum to generate high impact return,” he said.
The committee will work closely with JBWere to identify and vet investment opportunities, provide due diligence, and ensure accountability in impact measurement — a crucial step as Australia’s impact investing market matures.
The move comes as investors increasingly look to align portfolios with environmental and social outcomes, especially in sectors like housing, where demand far exceeds supply. NAB’s entry into this space via the Foundation is being seen as both a strategic capital allocation and a signal of institutional leadership.
With this fund, NAB joins a growing list of financial institutions leveraging balance sheets and philanthropic capital to accelerate solutions to some of the country’s most urgent challenges — from housing affordability to climate resilience.
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The federal budget has rattled property investors. But the biggest mistake isn’t the tax changes, it’s the conclusion many are drawing from them.
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The recent budget has forced a reckoning for property investors.
Negative gearing now restricted to new residential builds, the CGT discount gone and on paper, the numbers look different.
And many investors are responding by pivoting toward yield, prioritising cash flow over capital growth in a way that property strategists say misses the point entirely.
“The debate has shifted to yield versus growth as if they are opposing forces,” says Abdullah Nouh, founder of Melbourne-based buyers’ agency Mecca Property Group. “But that framing is itself the mistake.”
Nouh, who works with high-net-worth families and investors on long-term acquisition strategy, argues that capital growth remains the primary driver of genuine wealth creation and that the post-budget environment has made quality assets more important, not less.
The numbers make his case plainly. An additional $500 per week in rental income is welcome. A prestige asset appreciating by $1 million over a market cycle is transformative.
These are not equivalent outcomes, and portfolios built around yield at the expense of location and land value tend to generate income while wealth stands largely still.
The more nuanced shift Nouh is seeing among sophisticated investors is a move toward assets where both outcomes can be engineered simultaneously – established homes on substantial land in quality locations, where the existing dwelling can be repositioned, rental returns improved, and the underlying land value compounds independent of what sits on it.
For investors with existing equity, commercial property is also entering the conversation in a more serious way.
Prestige industrial assets, medical centres and long-leased essential retail offer income profiles that residential property in most capital city markets cannot currently match: longer lease terms, tenants covering outgoings, and greater predictability than the residential tenancy cycle.
“The investors who build lasting wealth are rarely the ones who chased yield or growth exclusively,” says Nouh.
“They are the ones who built a strategy they could sustain – one that generated enough income to hold quality assets through multiple cycles while those assets compounded in value.”
The budget has changed the settings. It has not changed the fundamentals.
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