Zara billionaire takes a big loss on Madison Avenue tower

Even fashion moguls can’t escape New York City’s office slump.

Amancio Ortega, the billionaire founder of Zara, is set to sell his Midtown office building at 366 Madison Ave. for about $50 million — a bruising markdown from the $115.5 million his family office Pontegadea paid in 2006, according to Bloomberg.

The nearly 60% loss underscores how far office values have fallen since the pandemic emptied desks across Manhattan.

Just steps from Grand Central, the 17-story tower is being sold to the Sioni Group, with Eastdil Secured brokering the deal. 

Neither the seller nor the buyer have commented on the transaction.

The sale doesn’t mean Ortega is retreating from real estate. 

The Inditex SA founder, whose net worth tops $104 billion, has been busy buying overseas, snapping up Paris’s Hotel Banke earlier this year for roughly $113 million and adding another trophy property on Barcelona’s Diagonal Avenue.

The markdown at 366 Madison is part of a larger story in New York, where many aging office buildings are being reimagined as housing. 

Projects like 25 Water St., billed as the largest office-to-residential conversion in US history, are reshaping the city with thousands of new apartments.

Together with similar efforts at 55 Broad, 5 Times Square and dozens of smaller properties, conversions are expected to deliver more than 17,000 new homes in the coming years — an ambitious push to counter soaring housing demand while cutting into the city’s glut of empty office space.