The Mormon Church’s Real Estate Empire

**Natalie Wong** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Sarah Holder** (0:10)
About 20 minutes south of Denver International Airport, there's a chunk of land bigger than Manhattan Central Park.

**Natalie Wong** (0:18)
They're planning for it to house more than 12,000 people, have a school and a fire station.

**Sarah Holder** (0:23)
It's almost 1,000 acres, slated to become a new neighborhood called Tributary.

**Natalie Wong** (0:29)
The Tributary is mainly still raw land. When we stumbled upon this, there wasn't really anything written about it. We spoke to people and nobody really knew too much about it.

**Sarah Holder** (0:40)
The developer behind the property is called Property Reserve, Inc. It's not a company that people might immediately recognize.

**Natalie Wong** (0:48)
The name behind Property Reserve is much more known, and it's actually the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has quietly held the land for many decades now.

**Sarah Holder** (0:57)
Also known as the Mormon Church.
It bought this land in Aurora, Colorado, back in the 1980s. And now, with the help of its real estate development arm, it's turning it into a master plan community.

**Natalie Wong** (1:10)
So we sought out to answer the question, why is the church investing in such a big project in Aurora, Colorado, and what do they plan on doing with the site? And it's not just home building, they're setting out to build entire communities across Florida, across Arizona, maybe even in Texas.

**Sarah Holder** (1:26)
It's not exactly a secret that over the past century, the Mormon Church has acquired a lot of land around the US. But what hasn't been clear is how much land the church has, where, and what it's doing with it.

**Ann Choi** (1:42)
As far as we can tell, the church owns about 2.4 million acres, the size of about three Rhode Islands. And if you were to compare their size to other private landholders, it puts the church into one of the largest, if not the largest, land owner in the states. To our estimate, it's worth upwards of $20 billion.

**Sarah Holder** (2:09)
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, the Mormon Church is now a major real estate developer with a unique investment strategy. Bloomberg commercial real estate reporter, Natalie Wong, and data reporter, Ann Choi, on how the LDS footprint has expanded and where the church is planning to build next.
So Natalie, when and why did the Mormon Church get into the real estate business?

**Natalie Wong** (2:39)
So real estate has played a role for a long time in the church. I mean, even its founder, Joseph Smith had always envisioned self-sufficient communities that are built around these types of temples and agriculture. And then you finally had their followers settle in Utah.
Owning land and property had become sort of intertwined with the church's emphasis on preparing for the future, building up that reserve to be financially stable. For much of its early history, going into the Great Depression, going into the war, the church actually experienced a lot of financial strain. They took on a lot of debt, and they really were not able to keep up with their expenses. And so by the end of the 1950s, they actually recruited a very successful businessman to join their leadership. And he played a really pivotal role in structuring what is now today a very self-sufficient, responsible investment unit of the church as a way to build these permanent capital reserves.

**Sarah Holder** (3:38)
There was another pivot moment for the Mormon Church's real estate investment strategy in 2017, when Ashley Powell took over Property Reserve, which is the church's real estate investment arm. Who is Ashley Powell? What is his background? And how does he kind of shake things up?

**Natalie Wong** (3:52)
Powell is a commercial real estate veteran. He had spent many years working in the commercial real estate investment arms of Deutsche Bank, Bental Kennedy. And these are firms that have deployed billions into real estate. And we've seen that when Powell came and took over leadership at Property Reserve in 2017, he really amped up the types of investments they have globally. I associated the church and their real estate holdings with their land, with their farmland and their ranch land and their temple sites. What we've really seen over the past decade is an increase in different types of investments that are more traditional in commercial real estate, more higher yielding. We've seen them invest in luxury apartments. We've seen them invest in hotels. We've seen them invest in warehouse portfolios across the country. What was really interesting about the tributary is that we're noticing that they are starting to turn raw land, farmland that they've owned for decades now into master planned housing developments.