Lowy is founder of Westfield and Scentre, the mall and shopping center businesses that have more than $50 billion in assets. Westfield was taken over by Unibail-Rodamco, a Paris-based real estate group, in a May 2018 deal worth $25 billion. His family sold its stake in Scentre, a Westfield spin-off, in October 2019.
Frank Lowy's net worth of $6.38B can buy ...
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The majority of Lowy's fortune is derived from proceeds received from Westfield, a shopping mall operator.
Westfield merged with Unibail-Rodamco, a Paris-based real estate group, in May 2018. The Lowy family held a 9.5% stake in Westfield prior to the merger based on its disclosed stake in the company's 2017 annual report. Lowy is credited in this analysis with more than $500 million in cash proceeds and about 3% of Unibail's stock, based on the 2018 annual report. His stake isn't reported in the 2019 annual report and it's assumed in this analysis that he sold the shares in 2019.
Lowy is attributed full ownership of his family's assets to reflect his status as Westfield's co-founder.
The value of his cash investments includes investment proceeds held by his family investment company LFG Holdings and is based on an analysis of dividends, market performance, investments, taxes and charitable contributions. It was updated on Aug. 13, 2019 to better reflect historical inflows and this led to an increase in the calculation of about $1.5 billion.
Frank Lowy was born in the industrial town of Fil'akovo, Slovakia, on Oct. 22, 1930, one of a traveling salesman's four children. Lowy's father died at Auschwitz, and he spent World War II living in Budapest until Germany’s defeat in 1945. He moved to Palestine as a teenager after the war, volunteered for the Haganah Zionist army and fought in the First Arab-Israeli War.
He moved to Australia in 1952, following his mother and sister, and took a job working a grinding machine in a toolmaking factory. He teamed up with another Holocaust survivor, John Saunders, to open a deli in a Sydney suburb, in 1955. The partners became property developers when they borrowed from a local bank manager and used profits from the deli and a coffee shop they owned to buy farmland. They created Westfield Investments, taking the name from its location in Sydney and the field they were subdividing.
The billionaire developed retail real estate throughout Australia and expanded to the U.S. in 1977 when he paid $21 million for a Trumbull, Connecticut shopping mall.
Lowy made a rare departure from the retail property sector in 1981 when he paid Rupert Murdoch A$842 million for Australia’s smallest national TV network and some other media assets. When he sold out three years later, investors lost A$450 million and Lowy was down A$100 million.
Malls proved much more lucrative for Lowy and having built the world's biggest shopping center empire, he stepped down as executive chairman of Westfield in 2011. His sons Peter and Steven were appointed joint managing directors while Lowy became non-executive chairman.
Following a 2010 restructure of Westfield whereby some of its Australian and New Zealand properties were put in a new publicly traded entity -- Westfield Retail -- a further restructure was announced in 2013 leading to the creation of Scentre and the new Westfield.
Westfield was taken over by Unibail-Rodamco, a Paris-based real estate group, in a May 2018 deal worth $25 billion. The Lowy family sold their remaining stake in Scentre in October 2019.
Son, David, manages the family's closely held investment company, LFG Holdings.
Away from Westfield, Lowy served as chairman of the Football Federation Australia until 2015 and played a big role in Australia's unsuccessful attempt at bidding for the right to host the World Cup in 2022. He and his wife, Shirley, live in a four-story harborfront mansion in Sydney.