- Amancio Ortega, after leaving the management of Inditex, has dedicated all his efforts to boost Pontegadea, his real estate business.
- Pontegadea is buying real estate all over the world, including the United States.
- The new target of Ortega’s company is an old building in central London.
The Spanish textile businessman and founder of Inditex maintains his interest in London real estate. Through his real estate investment group, Pontegadea, he began negotiations to buy a former BBC headquarters located in the London neighborhood of Fitzrovia.
Ortega plans to invest more than 80 million pounds sterling, almost 95 million dollars, according to CoStar News sources.
The current owner of the building is global investment company Abrdn, formerly Standard Life Aberdeen, which is being advised by local consultancy Savills.
Sources close to the talks note that, at the moment, there is no agreement and it is a negotiation.
Ortega’s real estate group, meanwhile, said that they prefer not to make any statements.
The property has 4,000 square meters and serves as the headquarters of the real estate, services and construction group Kier Group, which has been in the building since 2018 and has a 25-year contract.
This building was built almost a century ago as a printing press and later served as the headquarters of BBC Worldwide.
Pontegadea and Amancio Ortega’s real estate vision
The London real estate market is, together with the United States and Spain, the most important target for the Spanish investment group in recent times, where it has assets exceeding 3 billion.
Amancio Ortega’s major acquisition in London was The Post Building more than three years ago, for 700 million.
He also bought, among other properties, two properties in Oxford Street, one in St. James, the headquarters of the Rio Tinto company, Almack House, and Devonshire House, a huge building in Piccadilly.
In 2022, he invested 240 million in the purchase of a building in Glasgow.
This operation is one of the few that are occurring in the UK real estate market in recent times, due to the fact that purchases and sales have been paralyzed since the last quarter of 2022 in the face of the increase in interest rates by the Bank of England and, therefore, sellers and compadres, especially those in charge of financing the operations, are speculating on the evolution of prices.
The Spanish businessman’s real estate empire is grouped in Pontegadea, and is valued at 15.3 billion.
As we detailed in Investor Times, in 2022 he made purchases of residential skyscrapers in New York and Seattle, and also acquired office buildings in the United States. However, it abandoned negotiations to buy Meta’s future headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.
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