Bankia will leave its offices in what is known as Torre Cepsa next year and will transfer all its employees to its own skyscraper in Madrid, which is only one kilometer away, in Plaza de Castilla. For now, the entity has already left two of the five floors it occupied in the building located to the north of the city, in the Cuatro Torres complex.
Specifically, Bankia had leased the property from the first to the fifth floor, and has already left the second and third empty, relocating its employees between the first floor and a provisional space that it has rented on the tenth.
Before December 31, the bank has to leave the first floor, since Pontegadea, the owner of the building, already has a new tenant for the first three floors. It will be HomeAway, the vacation rental company, which will occupy this space that totals 4,960 square meters, in what is one of the most important rental operations by size in Madrid in the second half of the year. Thus, the company will leave its current headquarters, which is located at Paseo de la Castellana 79, and will move to the tower in the spring of 2018, as confirmed by the company itself.
The rest of the space that Bankia has in the Cepsa Tower will gradually leave it throughout 2018, as the repositioning reforms that the entity is carrying out at its headquarters in Madrid, in one of the Kio Towers, progress. Thus, the around 500 Bankia employees who currently work in the Cepsa Tower will move in phases, the first being at the end of this year.
With this move, Bankia leaves what for several years was one of its star assets within its real estate portfolio in Madrid until it was sold to the Abu Dhabi IPIC sovereign wealth fund in September 2016.
history of the skyscraper
Also known as Torre Foster, after the architect who designed it, it has passed through many hands since the creation of the project. It was Repsol who promoted its construction with the intention of making it its headquarters in Madrid. However, the oil company changed its mind after receiving a generous offer from the then former president of Caja Madrid, Miguel Blesa, for 815 million in 2007.
The entity also wanted this skyscraper to house its headquarters in the Capital, but its integration into Bankia paralyzed said project. After several sales attempts in the midst of the real estate crisis, in October 2013, the entity managed to lease most of the tower to the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund IPIC, owner of Cepsa, and the bank was left with only five floors.
The rental contract with the fund established a purchase option for the skyscraper that had to be executed before the end of 2016.
At that time, the fund did not have the necessary resources to carry out the acquisition due to the fall in oil prices. But he managed to draw up a master operation by exercising his right to purchase after having previously reached an agreement to sell the building with Pontegadea, Amancio Ortega’s real estate company.
The founder of Inditex paid 490 million euros for the skyscraper, in what was his largest operation to date in Spain, where his great acquisition had been the purchase of the Picasso Tower for 400 million euros from FCC in 2011.
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