Amancio Ortega has closed the deal to purchase the Royal Bank Plaza office complex, located in downtown Toronto (Canada), for about C$1,150 million, or just over €800 million at the current exchange rate, according to Bloomberg. It is the largest real estate acquisition made by the founder of Inditex, made through the holding company Pontegadea, which far exceeds $700 million paid to build a building in London at the end of 2019. In addition, they are among the most important real estate purchases since the outbreak of the pandemic.
According to Bloomberg, Pontegadea acquired this asset from two Canada Pension Funds. Specifically, employees of the municipality of Ontario and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, who put the building up for sale a year ago. It is a complex built in the late seventies and consists of two skyscrapers, the highest height of 180 meters and 40 floors. It is known as the “Golden Building”, since its windows have this element in their composition. It is the headquarters of the Royal Bank of Canada, the country’s leading bank.
This is not the first operation that Pontegadea has implemented in Canada. In 2016, it acquired a commercial building in Montreal and previously had another asset in Toronto itself.
Ortega’s real estate portfolio was valued at €14.075 million at the end of 2020, which is 7.2% lower than the previous year, due to the pandemic and the currency impact of the devaluation of the pound and dollar. In 2019, it surpassed its own record by reaching 15,163 million and surpassed the 15,000 million mark in valuation.
It was that year when he made his last big purchase, The Post Building, in London. A gold skyscraper that houses the headquarters of McKinsey in the British capital, and I paid 700 million euros for it. In the summer of last year, it acquired the headquarters of Cinven’s London, located in St James’s Square, for 220 million euros.
Other big purchases in the history of Pontegadea are those of the Troy Block and Arbor Bocks business complexes in Seattle (USA). first, occupied by amazonIt required an investment of 665 million euros while paying just under 400 million per second, as it is home to Facebook. Ortega focuses the bulk of his real estate investments between the United Kingdom, the United States and Spain.
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