Spanish billionaire and Zara founder Amancio Ortega buys $550 million Chicago office tower

Amancio Ortega, the Spanish billionaire who founded Zara, has bought the 51-story office tower at 1 N. Wacker Drive in Chicago for about $550 million, one of the largest office deals in the U.S. this year.

Pontegadea, Ortega’s family office, acquired the building from Donald Bren’s Irvine Co. in a deal completed Tuesday, CoStar News first reported. The purchase includes the assumption of a $353 million commercial mortgage-backed securities loan that Irvine took out in 2021. The sale had not appeared in Cook County property records as of Wednesday evening, according to Bisnow.

It is the largest outright office sale in Chicago since the Aon Center sold for $712 million in 2015. Only two bigger full-building office trades have closed in the U.S. in 2026: the $730 million sale of Park Avenue Tower in New York in January and the $691 million sale of San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid in April.

Completed in 2001, the tower has more than 1.4 million square feet of space and is about 94% leased, according to CoStar. Its tenants include accounting firm PwC, Swiss bank UBS and Fitch Ratings.

Irvine began marketing the property as early as January. The sale is the company’s first exit from a Chicago property, and it still owns two other office towers in the city, at 71 S. Wacker Drive and 300 N. LaSalle St.

Brokers had watched the deal as a test of how investors value top-tier offices that have kept rents high and vacancy low. Jeff Skender, a managing director at Cushman & Wakefield, said at a Bisnow conference in September that 1 N. Wacker would show whether owners who held their rents firm would be rewarded when they sold.

The tower adds to Ortega’s existing Chicago holdings. Pontegadea paid about $232 million in 2023 for 727 W. Madison St., a 492-unit apartment tower in the West Loop, and the firm owns property along the Magnificent Mile. The Chicago deal follows its purchase in August of a Baker Street rental building in London for £150 million ($202 million).

Ortega pays for his property purchases largely with dividends from Inditex, the Zara owner in which he holds a controlling stake, rather than borrowing against his shares. Pontegadea has been one of the most active buyers of trophy real estate as institutional investors pulled back amid higher interest rates. In July, it paid $912 million for an office complex in central Paris, and in 2025 it bought a Miami office tower for $275 million.