Zara billionaire Amancio Ortega pays $202 million for a Baker Street rental block

Amancio Ortega has paid £150 million, about $202 million, for a residential rental building in Marylebone, adding another central London property to one of the largest private real estate portfolios in Europe.

A spokesperson for Pontegadea Inversiones, the Inditex founder's family office, confirmed the purchase of 219 Baker Street to Bloomberg News, following a report by Green Street News. Rents on available flats in the building run from £7,275 to £9,850 a month, according to listings published by the property manager Ila, Bloomberg reported.

The building holds 86 newly built apartments developed by Ridgeback. Pontegadea completed the transaction in February and it became public only after details appeared in the British companies register, according to Spanish reporting on the filings. The firm incorporated a new United Kingdom subsidiary for the purchase and financed it through an intragroup loan, a structure Ortega uses routinely to avoid external bank debt and keep borrowing inside the group.

The deal marks Pontegadea's first move into British build-to-rent, the professionally managed rental housing model that has drawn increasing institutional capital in the United Kingdom. Ortega already owns residential rental assets in New York, Boston, Chicago and Dublin, including 19 Dutch, a 63-storey tower in Lower Manhattan, and 727 West Madison in Chicago.

His British holdings had previously concentrated on offices and, more recently, logistics.

Ortega, 90, ranks as the world's 15th wealthiest person and among Europe's largest private landowners, with a portfolio valued at roughly €19.3 billion, about $22 billion, in 2024, according to Bloomberg. London accounts for around 15 of those assets, worth more than €4.2 billion combined by Europa Press calculations, and his British subsidiary Pontegadea UK Ltd valued its property holdings at £2.65 billion in 2025.

The pace of acquisition has accelerated this year. Ortega bought the Capital 8 business centre in Paris for €800 million in July, his largest European transaction to date, and paid C$1.1 billion for the Post building in Vancouver last year. Bloomberg reported that most of his property empire consists of premium offices, retail and hotels, including Madrid's Norman Foster-designed Torre Moeve, The Post in London, and part of Amazon's Seattle headquarters known as the Troy Block.

Pontegadea funds those purchases with the dividends Ortega receives from his controlling stake in Inditex. The holding company, comprising Pontegadea Inversiones, Partler 2006 and Pontegadea GB 2020, earned €10.06 billion in 2025, up 7.8 percent, and its assets reached €117.08 billion, an increase of 5.8 percent on the €110.62 billion recorded in 2024.

Ortega opened the first Zara store with his then-wife in 1975. The chain now has more than 2,000 outlets and forms the core of Inditex, which also owns Massimo Dutti and Pull&Bear.