The New York-based private equity firm Blackstone Group has agreed to sell Strategic Hotels & Resorts Inc to China’s Anbang Insurance Group for around $6.5 billion, in what will be the largest ever platform-level acquisition in the US hospitality sector by a Chinese company.
Blackstone declined to comment but sources close to the deal have confirmed the news to PERE.
The US luxury resort company Strategic is the owner and asset manager of 16 hotels and resorts across the country spread over 807,000 square feet.
The company is being sold only three months after Blackstone acquired it at a total transaction value of $6 billion via its $15.8 billion Blackstone Real Estate Partners VIII fund.
According to a Bloomberg report, Blackstone was planning to sell individual properties in the portfolio before Anbang made an offer to take over the entire company.
Anbang Insurance was also at the helm of the largest acquisition of a US property asset by a Chinese company back in 2014 when it acquired the iconic Waldorf Astoria hotel from the Hilton Group for around $1.95 billion in October. The insurer made headlines with the approximately $1.4 million price it paid per room for the New York hotel.
Chinese insurance companies have been a significant part of the growing wave of Chinese capital flocking to international real estate markets in a bid to diversify their property holdings and reduce exposure in an uncertain domestic economy. Over the next five years, insurers from the mainland are expected to spend as much as $73 billion in overseas property acquisitions, according to a report published by Cushman & Wakefield in November last year.
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