BLACKSTONE Group LP has agreed to sell Strategic Hotels & Resorts Inc. to China’s Anbang Insurance Group Co. for about US$6.5 billion, just three months after it purchased the U.S. luxury-resort company, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

    The price is about US$450 million more than Blackstone paid for Strategic in December. The New York-based private equity firm had been planning to sell individual properties in the portfolio before Anbang made a pre-emptive offer for the entire company, said the sources, who asked not to be named because the transaction is private.

    The transaction marks a deeper push into U.S. hotels for Beijing-based Anbang, which last year purchased New York’s landmark Waldorf Astoria. It would rank as the largest U.S. real estate purchase by a buyer from China.

    Strategic owns 16 properties across the United States, including the Four Seasons resorts in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Ritz-Carltons in Half Moon Bay and Laguna Niguel, California, San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado and Manhattan’s JW Marriott Essex House.

    (SD-Agencies)