Meet Amazon’s landlord
In 1999, Hamid Moghadam bet that the internet would revolutionise the way people bought goods.
So the Iranian immigrant and property investor sold all of his retail holdings and poured the money into warehouses.
These days, Prologis, the real estate investment trust that Moghadam leads, controls nearly 1bn square feet of the warehouse space around the world. Its facilities are the vital nodes of ecommerce for tenants like Amazon, Walmart and many others.
Moghadam’s is a great immigrant success story. Now 64, he moved to the US to study at the age of 16 with plans to return to his native Tehran to take over the family business — until the Iranian revolution intervened. He stuck around, and eventually started his own property business.
Covid-19 has cast clouds over other big real estate categories, like office towers and shopping malls, but it has proven a boon to ecommerce and so to warehouses.
“A whole generation of people that were not consumers of ecommerce — older people — have now seen the convenience and the magic . . . and are not going to go back,” Moghadam told the FT’s Joshua Chaffin.
Now the question is whether he can find new properties with large markets built up, and new entrants crowding the market.
Private equity group Blackstone, which has bought up $100bn of warehouses, is already making a big play on online retail. Jonathan Gray, its president, recently said ecommerce was the “number one theme at the firm”.