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Go West: Amancio Ortega buys an apartment tower in Chicago for 212 million

The founder of Spanish fashion empire Inditex Amancio Ortega continues to conquer the real estate market of the United States. For now only as an investor. After a series of acquisitions of homes and warehouses in different parts of the North American country, the majority shareholder of Zara, as reported by The Real Deal, has just bought a luxury apartment tower in Chicago for 232 million dollars (about 212 million euros).

The oval-shaped tower has 492 apartments spread over 45 floors and is currently considered the tallest building in Chicago. The building is located in the modern district West Loop, known as a mecca for foodies. The deal marks the highest asking price paid for an apartment block in the city since before the pandemic.

To this new asset are added other investment businesses in Chicago, which include the Eurostars Magnificent Mile hotel in River North purchased in 2019 for $72.5 million. In this way, the Galician businessman continues with his real estate investments in the United States after buying in 2022 a skyscraper of 461 luxury homes in Seattle for $324 million or a luxury apartment tower in New York for almost 500 million dollars.

Apart from the rental business, the king of textiles has an impressive logistics portfolio in the United States, such as Walmart's automated logistics center in California, acquired last July for $109 million, a Fedex warehouse in Wisconsin for $35 million or a distribution center in Philadelphia, for an amount of 147 million euros. However, the largest real estate acquisition made by Ortega has been the purchase of the Royal Bank Plaza office complex, known as “the gold building” in downtown Toronto, for about 1,150 million Canadian dollars in 2022.

He entrusts all operations to his investment firm Pontegadea Inmobiliaria, which has an important portfolio of high-profile offices and commercial properties located in the centers of large cities in Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States and Asia.

Surely these are not the last attempts to become from the emperor of the textile to the king of the brick. In the first list of the year published by Forbes, Ortega went from 23rd to 13th place after increasing his wealth by almost 17,000 million euros in 2022. It is expected that this year he will receive 2,217 million euros in dividends from his textile empire, above the 1,718 million he received for the same concept last year.