NexCore’s co-founder and CEO has helped build the Denver-based company into one of the nation’s leading healthcare real estate developers with a growing senior living platform.
The Denver Business Journal has named Greg Venn a 2026 Most Admired CEO winner, recognizing more than 20 years of leadership and vision at NexCore Group and a career spent shaping how people experience healthcare and aging. Today, NexCore’s portfolio extends across medical outpatient development, senior living, and academic medicine and science, with projects and communities serving healthcare providers, patients, residents, and families across the country.
NexCore was founded in 2004 by Greg Venn and a small group of partners who saw an opportunity to take a different approach to healthcare real estate development. The company began as an at-risk developer, with its earliest projects being funded by private investors. The trusted investment relationships that would become an integral part of NexCore’s growth had just begun to be established, and many of those early investors are still important partners today. But the company needed a way to grow beyond its local roots. A crucial opportunity came in 2005, when NexCore took on two major healthcare real estate projects in an unfamiliar market.
The Eberle Medical Office Building at Alexian Brothers Medical Center presented a complex development problem. The hospital needed additional outpatient space, but its campus was already short on parking and offered few obvious options for expansion. NexCore found a way to address both needs by placing the medical office building above a new parking garage. Sharing foundations, lobby, and infrastructure helped reduce development costs, while an enclosed connection to the hospital’s existing campus created a more convenient path for patients.
At the time, NexCore was still a small Colorado company with no previous experience in the Chicago marketplace. For a young company proving itself in an unfamiliar market, winning the project was a significant step, and successfully executing the development provided a clear demonstration of what NexCore could do. The project had to meet the hospital system’s operational and financial needs. It had to work for physician groups and the individual physicians practicing there. And it had to create an environment that worked for patients. NexCore’s role was to bring those needs together and find a real estate solution that could serve them all.
In many ways, the successful Chicago development anticipated the way NexCore would grow over the next two decades. The combination of entrepreneurial thinking, a willingness to take ownership of risk, collaboration, design, and a desire to find creative solutions to difficult problems would become a recurring pattern as NexCore expanded across the country. Those characteristics also reflect the background and values that Greg Venn brought to the company from its inception.
Greg Venn grew up in Lamar, Colorado, where his father worked as a cattle broker and built his business on relationships, reputation, and trust. Greg went on to study environmental design at the University of Colorado in Boulder before building a career that encompassed architecture, finance, construction, and real estate development. Eventually, that path brought him to The Neenan Company, where he served as Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Real Estate Development. It was there that Greg saw an opportunity to pursue healthcare real estate as an at-risk developer. In 2004, he took that idea forward and co-founded NexCore Group.
Entrepreneurial thinking has remained part of NexCore’s culture, along with a willingness to take ownership of the risks that come with pursuing an opportunity. A perfect example of this came with the company’s expansion eleven years ago into the senior living industry. At the time, NexCore’s partners were making observations about the market and an emerging demographic shift toward a rapidly aging population, and they were asking: Why not senior living? At first, the company was hesitant to dive in, simply because in those days it was primarily a development and investment enterprise. NexCore were not operators. But after perceiving a market opportunity, and with support and encouragement from trusted investors, the company took another risk.
Ultimately, that expansion represented a natural progression from medical development into another essential pillar of the healthcare real estate market, serving not only the investor but also the needs of retiring seniors and their families. NexCore has become a nationally recognized partner in senior living development and operations through its senior operations entity, Experience Senior Living (ESL). The company represents an important expansion of NexCore’s reach into a growing market. While ESL is wholly owned by NexCore, the two operate as one core company, united by the same values that have shaped NexCore’s approach from the beginning.
Throughout the company’s history, NexCore has taken a collaborative approach to business, bringing expertise from across multiple disciplines to meet the challenges of complex development problems. Bringing multiple perspectives together gives the company a broader field of vision: a better understanding of the full scope of the problem, the people affected by it, and the opportunities available to improve the result.
In many ways, the story of NexCore’s growth is a testament to that field of vision. It means understanding the needs of the different people and organizations impacted by the work, from investors and healthcare systems to independent physicians, and from patients to seniors choosing a retirement community to call home. Every project creates a ripple effect that extends outward from its inception through the people and organizations it serves. Successful execution creates value for those stakeholders while building the experience, relationships, and trust that NexCore carries into each opportunity.
For Greg, the future of NexCore is about ensuring that the people, relationships, and values that have shaped the company continue into its next generation of leaders, and the company continues to invest in those who will carry that work forward.
“I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built, but what means the most to me are the people who built it with us. We’ve had partners and team members who have been part of this story for years, and in many cases decades. You don’t build those kinds of relationships around a transaction. You build them by earning trust, doing what you say you’re going to do and showing up for people over time.” – Greg Venn
Greg’s recognition as a 2026 Most Admired CEO winner reflects more than two decades of building NexCore one opportunity, one relationship, and one successful outcome at a time.