摩门教地产帝国：持有240万英亩土地，估值超200亿美元

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About 20 minutes south of Denver International Airport, there's a chunk of [music] land bigger than Manhattan Central Park. They're planning for it to house more [music] than 12,000 people, have school and a fire station. It's almost a thousand acres slated to become a new neighborhood [music] called Tributary.

Tributary is mainly still raw land. When we [music] stumbled upon this, there wasn't really anything written about it. When we spoke to people, nobody really knew too much about it.

The developer behind the property [music] is called Property Reserve Inc. It's not a company that people might immediately recognize.

But 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. Also known [music] as the Mormon Church.

It bought this land in Aurora, Colorado back in the 1980s. And now, [music] with the help of its real estate development arm, it's turning it into a master plan community.

So we sought out to answer the question, you know, 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.

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 [music] has, where, and what it's doing with it.

As far as we can tell, the church owns about 2.4 million acres, the size about three Rhode Islands,

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and if you were to compare their size to other private land holders, 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.

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I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, the Mormon [music] church is now a major real estate developer with a unique investment [music] strategy. Bloomberg commercial real estate reporter Natalie Wong and data reporter Ann Choi

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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?

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, you know, financially stable.

For much of its early history, going into, you know, 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, um, as a way to build these permanent capital reserves.

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?

Powell is a commercial real estate veteran. He had spent many years working in the commercial real estate investment arms of Deutsche Bank, Bentall 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, but their farmland and their ranch land and their temple sites.

But what we've really seen over the past decade [music] is an increase in different types of investments that are more traditional in commercial real estate, more higher yielding. We've seen them invest [music] 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,

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into master-planned housing developments. And how do we know what we know about the size of the Mormon church's holdings? Tell us about the data reporting you did to come to this number.

Through Natalie's reporting, we identified key subsidiaries of the church. [music] We did additional reporting to find out what other entities they use to purchase land. So, we provided multiple addresses, multiple names of the entities [music] or key members behind the entities to a third-party data provider, and we asked, "Can you scour your database to give us a sense of most comprehensive look at their current land ownership?"

They scour thousands of counties, um, tax records office.

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They track down sales transaction data. And this is really the hard part [music] because some states, like Texas, they're not required to disclose the sales [music] price at the time of transaction. So, really the $20 figure is an underestimation.

What don't we know about these holdings? What could be left out here?

We do not have the comprehensive list of the subsidiaries of the church.

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We do not know the true value of the price that they paid for different lands, just like this tributary project. [music] When they bought it in the 1980s, they bought it at a discount. Now, the value of that land after being developed, housing [music] 10,000 people, that value is going to increase many folds.

Yeah, and for example, like their SunBridge land in Florida, SunBridge is this [music] new housing master plan development that they started doing in 2014. I'm sure when they bought that land decades ago as part of their overall Deseret Ranch land, it was worth [music] much less. And now, there's luxury housing on it. They're building industrial portfolios, offices. That value has likely soared. How does the centrality of real estate investment and the amount of money that the Mormon church is making on real estate development compared [clears throat] to other churches' real estate approaches?

There's a big difference because when it comes to the Mormon church, it is extremely centralized. Everything is sort of run from Utah, whether it's investments in the UK or investments in New York or investments in Colorado. With the Catholic church, it's different. Different dioceses and different cities own their own properties, and it's not really run by the Vatican church. So, if we were to try to estimate how much the Catholic church owned in its entirety, it would be a completely different project.

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Coming up, we dig into the way the Mormon church makes its [music] purchases, how it approaches its investments, and the consequences of the limited transparency we have into its holdings.

I want to talk more about the investment approach that the Mormon church takes because it's really different from the one we see from, say, wealthy individual real estate investors or even some of the other developers that you cover, Natalie. How does the Mormon church pay for these purchases?

So, what we've heard from our sources [music] is that the Mormon church likes to pay in all cash. They don't like to take on debt [music] and that ties back to their faith. They don't like to take on leverage. So, they think with a very