Some of the biggest names in commercial real estate investment are reportedly bidding for a portfolio of 15 luxury hotels owned by Anbang Insurance Group.
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Brookfield Asset Management, SoftBank's Fortress Investment Group, Blackstone Group, South Korea’s Mirae Asset Management and the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore, GIC, reportedly placed bids, Bloomberg reports.
The portfolio includes such notable hotels as the Essex House in Manhattan, the InterContinental Hotels in Chicago and Miami, and the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. The Waldorf Astoria in New York, which Anbang also owns, reportedly isn't in the portfolio.
Anbang acquired the hotels in 2016 from Blackstone Group for $5.5B. Anbang hired Bank of America to sell the hotels, and has received offers of as much as $5.8B, Bloomberg reports.
Anbang, a major insurance company based in Beijing and until last year an aggressive investor in U.S. commercial real estate, has been looking to unload CRE assets recently, including the hotel portfolio. The dispositions are at the behest of the Chinese government, which has been insisting its companies decrease their foreign investments. The government temporarily seized Anbang last year.
Chinese investors were net sellers of $854M of U.S. commercial property in Q4, according to Real Capital Analytics, as cited by the Wall Street Journal.
The fourth quarter of last year also marked the third straight quarter Chinese investors sold more U.S. property than they bought, and the first time these investors have been net sellers for that long.
