In November, Spanish clothing billionaire Amancio Ortega paid about $850 million in cash for the historic Canada Post building in Vancouver—a sprawling tech hub spanning an entire city block with more than a million square feet of office space leased to Amazon. It broke the record for the largest office sale ever in Canada.

It also marked the secretive Zara founder’s 13th real estate purchase last year. Altogether the Spaniard, who is worth $141 billion, spent more than $3 billion last year across 10 cities in 8 countries, buying up seven office buildings, two hotels, two industrial properties, a luxury retail complex and an apartment tower, plus a 49% stake in a large British port operator.

More and more of the world’s wealthiest are pumping billions into real estate. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison owns nearly $3 billion of properties including the Hawaiian island of Lanai, hotels in California and Florida plus a Palm Beach estate, while hedge fund titan Ken Griffin has shelled out nearly $2 billion in recent years on lavish homes in Florida, France, London and New York.

But no one has spent so much of their spare change on real estate as Ortega. Since taking Zara’s parent Inditex, the world’s largest clothing retailer, public on the Madrid stock exchange in 2001, the now 90-year-old Ortega has shelled out roughly $24 billion on 216 properties in nearly 100 markets; he’s held onto all but 10 of them. That’s more than the estimated $20 billion Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has sunk into his rocket maker Blue Origin.

Forbes combed through corporate filings, land records and press releases in nine countries plus data from real estate databases Regrid and Real Capital Analytics to map out Ortega’s real estate empire. It’s worth an estimated $25 billion, spanning more than 200 properties across 13 countries. That makes him the top property baron in the world with a more valuable portfolio than the most successful property developers, Australia’s Harry Triguboff ($23.2 billion) and America’s Donald Bren ($19.2 billion).

The son of a railway worker, Ortega got his start as a gofer in a shirt store at age 14. In the 1960s, he and his then-wife Rosalía Mera, a seamstress, started making gowns and lingerie in his living room. They launched Zara in 1975 and Inditex a decade later. They divorced in 1986 but she remained involved as a board member until 2004 and a shareholder until her death in 2013.

Ortega started investing in real estate in earnest in 2001, the year he took Inditex public. As part of the IPO, he sold a 13.5% stake in the firm for $1.1 billion and soon after set up his holding company, Pontegadea. Through the latter, he bought the Club Hípico Casas Novas, an equestrian center in his home region of Galicia where his daughter, Marta, learned to ride horses. Over the next 25 years, he has steadily increased his property portfolio, largely using part of his enormous annual Inditex dividends—a total of about $28 billion (post-tax) since the 2001 IPO, according to Forbes estimates—as well as reinvesting rental income into new acquisitions.

ORTEGA’S TOP PURCHASES

1. Royal Bank Plaza, $916 million

Toronto, Canada | 2022

2. Canada Post, $855 million

Vancouver, Canada | 2025

3. The Post, $785 million

4. Troy Block, $740 million

5. The Adelphi, $713 million

According to two brokers who have worked with Ortega’s firm and spoke with Forbes anonymously to speak freely, Ortega tends to buy trophy properties in all-cash deals without debt and rarely sells. Pontegadea’s 2024 annual accounts, the most recent available, disclosed just $390 million in liabilities across the company. That’s only 2% of assets, a nearly unheard of amount of leverage in the real estate business particularly with commercial properties.

"He's much different than most real estate investors in that he seems to have unlimited amounts of money," says one broker. “He likes things that don't have a lot of risk, he's not trying to buy something and improve it. He's buying collectible assets that are best in class in the market. A little bit more like an art buyer of the highest-end art pieces.”

Some of those trophy purchases include the 43-story Torre Picasso skyscraper in Madrid ($540 million in 2011) and the landmark Devonshire House overlooking Green Park in London ($671 million in 2013), as well as the 800,000-square-foot Troy Block office complex home to Amazon in Seattle ($740 million in 2019) and the gold-coated Royal Bank Plaza in Toronto ($916 million in 2022). Many of Ortega’s office and retail properties are anchored by large, blue-chip tenants with long-term leases such as Amazon, Apple, Meta, Nike, Spotify and, of course, Zara. He also leases warehouses to Amazon, FedEx, Home Depot and Walmart.

"They buy defensive real estate, which means highly strategic, urban, irreplaceable locations that are always going to be able to lease space long-term,” says another broker. “These tenants are publicly traded, they have billions of dollars worth of market cap. You don't have to be concerned that they're going to go out of business.”

Another key difference is how long he holds onto properties. According to real estate database Real Capital Analytics, he’s only disposed of 10 buildings. “They buy these assets with a view to hold them in perpetuity. Other investors usually hold for five to ten years. That's absolutely not how Pontegadea underwrites real estate, they're looking for long-term cash flows,” adds one of the brokers.

That also helps insulate Pontegadea from big swings in property valuations and changing market dynamics, particularly these days as commercial properties, particularly office buildings, face a slump.

Ortega didn’t become the world’s wealthiest real estate baron because he has an affinity for buildings and warehouses—it’s a smart tax strategy that has helped him save some $800 million over 25 years. Thanks to a decades-old wealth tax, combined with a solidarity tax passed in 2022 targeting millionaire fortunes, idle cash is a liability in Spain. Every year, on December 31st, the Spanish government audits the bank accounts of the ultra-wealthy to work out their tax bill. The top wealth and solidarity tax rate is 3.5% and is on top of any dividend or capital gains taxes already paid. It applies to all assets and cash, including those within holding companies.

But it also comes with a notable exemption for family businesses, allowing folks who tick a few key boxes—owning at least 5% of the company, holding a leadership position and proving it’s an active holding company, as Ortega does in Pontegadea—to avoid taxes as long as the cash is tied up in active business assets and not sitting idly in a bank account.

Forbes estimates that Ortega has saved about $800 million in wealth taxes since 2001 by reinvesting his dividends into ports, solar and wind farms, telecom and infrastructure companies as well as dozens of properties. “This has been a key factor in the expansion of Pontegadea’s real estate portfolio,” says Raquel Plaza, a tax adviser at London-based tax and wealth management firm Blevins Franks.

There’s another tax liability that Ortega has been able to artfully moderate. Because he owns his stake in Inditex via Pontegadea—and not directly—Ortega can also effectively bypass Spain’s substantial 30% top dividend tax rate on personal income. Instead, thanks to an exemption for domestic companies that own at least 5% of their local subsidiary for more than one year—which applies to Pontegadea’s stake in Inditex—he pays a paltry 1.25% on those enormous annual dividends. Prior to 2021, there was a total exemption, meaning Ortega likely didn’t pay a cent in taxes on earlier dividends, which amounted to nearly $15 billion over two decades.

Overall, that exemption has helped him save an estimated $7 billion in dividend taxes over the past 25 years. A spokesperson for Pontegadea told Forbes that Ortega and Pontegadea pay taxes on other sources of income and that Inditex dividends are distributed to shareholders with taxes already paid prior to distribution, so no further tax is withheld to prevent double taxation.

Despite being one of the world’s largest family offices by assets, Pontegadea has just around 90 employees spread among eight offices around the world. Its board is composed of just four people: Ortega; his second wife Flora Pérez Marcote; their daughter Marta Ortega, who is now chair of Inditex; and the holding company’s longtime CEO, Roberto Cibeira. Another longtime deputy, Jose Arnau, stepped down from the board in October. A representative for Pontegadea declined to make Ortega, Cibeira or Arnau available to Forbes.

In a rare interview with the Financial Times in 2020, Cibeira said that Pontegadea is “not looking for enormous returns” but instead “for investments that protect us, that produce a constant cash flow and which maintain the value of the capital.” At the time, he estimated that 95% of the firm's properties were in "prime areas” such as high-end shopping areas in major cities. Added Arnau in the same interview: “We have an enormous quantity of dividends that we have to reinvest and therefore we have a size that we never thought we were going to have.”

Those dividend checks are only getting bigger. Ortega is set to receive a record $3.8 billion dividend from Inditex in two tranches in May and November. He’s already plenty busy spending it. In February, Australian asset manager Macquarie announced an $8 billion deal to take over publicly traded import and export logistics provider Qube Holdings in partnership with Pontegadea and an Australian pension fund.

It’s unclear how much of that will be paid by Ortega, but he’ll likely find more ways to spend his new cash haul before the Spanish government’s New Year’s eve tax deadline.

© Forbes