The Mormon Church Is Quietly Expanding Its Real Estate Empire

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:16)
It is one of the largest landowners in the United States, and it's been known to outbid Bill Gates for land paying all cash.

**Carol Massar** (0:27)
Who are you talking about?

**Tim Stenovec** (0:27)
We're talking about the Mormon Church. It's the subject of today's big take from Natalie Wong, commercial real estate reporter for Bloomberg News. She and Anna Choi wrote the story.
Natalie is here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Studio. Welcome, welcome.

**Natalie Wong** (0:44)
Thank you for having me.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:44)
Congratulations on this.
There's a huge piece, there's a lot of history here as well. I want to start with what you and the team found today about the Mormon Church's real estate footprint.

**Natalie Wong** (0:56)
Sure. So really this project started because we had heard that the Mormons owned a lot of farmland, temples obviously, but that they were starting to do more housing potentially and buy offices or luxury apartments. We wanted to figure out exactly how much they owned across the US. What we found out was they own a lot. They're one of the largest landowners.
They own from what we can track, which is a minimum of publicly available records. They own 2.4 million acres, roughly the same as two Delawares, and that has a property value assessed at just over $20 billion. But that is just a base amount. It's likely much higher than that.

**Carol Massar** (1:32)
So let's get to the how. How have they accumulated so much?

**Natalie Wong** (1:36)
They've been doing it for decades. It really ties back to their early history. Accumulating land, agriculture, farming ties back to their early founder, Joseph Smith, and it's something that they've been doing for decades now. What we've noticed with our reporting is that they've been turning land that they've owned for many decades now and starting to look at potential development opportunities in high growth corridors in places like Florida, Colorado, Texas, and Arizona.

**Tim Stenovec** (2:01)
You make the point in the piece, it's not all about building houses of worship or universities, for example. This is about, in some cases, building homes or owning commercial real estate. What is their strategy?

**Natalie Wong** (2:14)
Right. So the church says that all of this goes back to funding their humanitarian mission and the church's mission of spreading the gospel. But when we spoke to investors and brokers about the church and how they operated on an investment level, these are for-profit entities that are investing in their commercial real estate, for example. They say they operate more like a sovereign wealth fund than they do a religious institution. Many of the leaders in the church and in these commercial real estate arms of the church come from big business backgrounds. One of the leaders that we highlight, Ashley Powell, who leads Property Reserve, their real estate investment arm. He's been leading it since 2017, and he comes from real estate backgrounds, firms with executive positions in Deutsche Bank as well as in BGO, formerly known as Bentle Kennedy. So he's a real estate executive that has worked for many years in the industry and has come in to lead the church and has significantly grown their assets under management over the past decade.

**Carol Massar** (3:07)
So now they're getting into the politics of building. Basically, that's what they're doing. So talk more about what are some of the critics? What are they saying? And then how is the church responding to it? What's their response?

**Natalie Wong** (3:17)
Right. I mean, the land that they own is significant and they're really planning these master plan communities. We're not just saying like dozens of homes, even though that's quite a bit.
These are thousands of homes in major cities, close to major international airports. It will have an impact on the communities, on traffic and on the local neighborhoods there. And so some of the concerns we've heard about is that a lot of these lands are on rural land. There's environmental sensitivities, there's traffic sensitivities. You have some local residents that are concerned about what this type of development will do to infrastructure, to water, to the wildlife corridors that exist in these places. And it's unclear because there isn't a lot of transparency to be honest around many of these projects.

**Tim Stenovec** (4:00)
Well, let's talk a little bit about that, the transparency side of this. You make the point along with Ann in the piece that you only know what you know. And there are only certain states have disclosure rules. Texas, for example, doesn't have a disclosure rule, so you wouldn't be able to necessarily see what other assets the church owns. How does this fit into their total assets that are under management if we are looking at this like a sort of sovereign wealth fund, as one source told you?