Amancio Ortega continues to invest in the United States, the country that has attracted most of his recent real estate investments. This time, however, the founder and major shareholder of Inditex did not purchase an office building as usual, but rather a Fedex logistics platform, as reported to the Wisconsin Department of Treasury and appears on the public register consulted by EL PAÍS.
The operation was carried out by Ponte Gadea Compass, based in Miami (Florida) and resulted in a payout of 35 million dollars (around 34 million euros). The seller is Vereit/OW Menomonee Falls WI, a subsidiary of Vereit, a Phoenix, Arizona real estate company that was acquired by Realty Income Group, a San Diego-based retail giant. It houses numerous stores from Walgreens, 7-Eleven, Dollar General, CVS, Sainsbury’s and Fedex, among others.
The warehouse acquired is located in Menomonee Falls, a town on the outskirts of Milwaukee, the largest city in the state of Wisconsin. According to official records, the warehouse and the purchased property cover an area of 30.5 acres (approximately 12 hectares). The operation was completed on July 28 and registered by the Wisconsin Department of Treasury on August 5. The purchase was announced by the financial daily Milwaukee BizTimes.
Fedex logistics warehouse purchased by Amancio Ortega in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin in an image from Google Maps.
Fedex is a transportation and logistics giant that billed about $84,000 million last year with profit of $5,231 million. It has a market value of around 60,400 million euros. The warehouse that Ortega bought is the main platform operating in the Milwaukee area. The rent he pays for the ship, which will continue to operate with the new landlord, is unknown.
Pontegadea has subsidiaries with which it manages properties in nine countries (Spain, USA, UK, France, Canada, Italy, Portugal, South Korea and Mexico). These are offices, hotels, commercial premises or other types of buildings – the purchase of a skyscraper with luxury apartments in New York was recently announced – and Ortega receives a return by leasing them. This business had sales of 647 million in 2021, 34 million more than a year earlier.
Pontegadea’s real estate portfolio was valued at 15,264 million euros at the end of 2022, an increase of 8.4% compared to 14,075 million in 2020, beating pre-pandemic valuations. This value has increased with the purchases made this year. In addition to the New York skyscraper, it acquired a 30,000 square meter office building in Glasgow, Scotland, in April. The Scottish media dubbed it the largest office property deal in the country’s history for the €237 million in which it was scrambled.
Pontegadea mainly invests in office buildings. There are also some excellent commercial spaces with tenants such as Apple, Primark and H&M. And New York’s recent purchase is the most prominent of all houses. Although Inditex is very strong in logistics with its own warehouse network, this is the first known real estate investment in the logistics sector in Pontegadea, representing a step in its diversification.
Besides real estate, Ortega has diversified his wealth with investments in the energy and telecom sectors, in these cases as a minority shareholder but prominently. It is a shareholder in Enagás, Red Eléctrica, REN (the Portuguese electricity grid), renewable energy projects and Telxius, a subsidiary of Telefónica.