One of the world’s largest hospitality companies, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, might soon be the object of the largest-ever takeover of a U.S. company by a Chinese firm.The Chinese government is in discussion with three companies – Shanghai Jin Jiang International Hotels; HNA, parent of Hainan Airlines; and China Investment Corp., a sovereign wealth fund – one of which will bid on the massive hotel chain.
The government plans to choose just one company to avoid a possible bidding war for Starwood, which owns over 1,200 properties worldwide and manages brands such Westin, W Hotels and St. Regis, unnamed sources told the Wall Street Journal.
It’s not yet clear what the bidders are willing to pay, but the amount is likely to exceed Starwood’s start-of-Tuesday valuation of $12 billion, the Journal reported.
The hotel firm’s stock price jumped 9.1 percent Tuesday to 74.81 on the news, its highest level since 2009. Starwood in April said it was exploring various options that included a sale or merger, largely as a reaction to having lagged behind competitors like Hilton and Marriott. Its longtime CEO, Frits van Paasschen, resigned in February and Starwood has been selling off hotel properties this year.
A potential deal would be the latest in a string of major hotel pickups by Chinese firms. Last year, the insurance giant Anbang bought the Waldorf-Astoria at 301 Park Avenue in New York’s Midtown for nearly $2 billion. And in February, Sunshine Insurance Group, bought the Baccarat Hotel at 20 West 53rd Street, then a Starwood property, paying $230 million.
“Chinese investors have been pretty aggressive in the hotel market over the last year or so,” said Lukas Hartwich, an analyst at Green Street Advisors LLC, told Bloomberg. “Starwood has some pretty powerful brands. It’s an attractive platform, especially if you don’t already own a platform with that kind of cachet.”
All three firms involved in a possible bid for Starwood are state-controlled or partly owned by the Chinese government.
The Starwood Capital Group chair and CEO was on Bloomberg this week when the topic of the world’s second largest economy came up. While Starwood has invested in China in the past – namely in a Chinese hotel company and a Beijing office building – Sternlicht said his firm hasn’t tapped into the market “in four, five years now.”
When asked why, Sternlicht cited reservations regarding the country’s “rulebook” on foreign investment. “I know I can get in, [but] I’m not sure I can get out when I want to get out,” he said.
“I always think of China as a company masquerading as a country,” Sternlicht added. “There are rules that I’m not sure foreign investors should trust.”
Sternlicht also said that from a real estate investment perspective, Chinese interest rates “are not that low, so you have the inverse of the U.S. where if you’re buying really good real estate, you might find that the yield on the property is lower than the cost of debt.” That, he noted, “is one of my red lights in investment – don’t do that.”
Sternlicht was part of the joint venture that developed 1 Hotel & Homes in Miami Beach earlier this year. In June, a Starwood affiliate paid $17 million for a waterfront lot on North Bay Road.
The EB-5 visa program, which is enormously popular with developers but criticized by some lawmakers as an unfair express route to U.S. citizenship for the wealthy, just got a five-day reprieve.
Renewal of the program – which awards a U.S. green card to foreigners who invest $500,000 into the U.S. economy – was part of a short-term spending bill approved by the House of Representatives Friday. The bill, approved by the Senate on Thursday, will keep the government running through Dec. 16 while lawmakers negotiate the $1.15 trillion budget, of which EB-5 is a small component.
The EB-5 program, which offers 10,000 U.S. visas annually and has been dominated by Chinese investors in recent years, was initially up for renewal in September, when lawmakers passed a stopgap measure to keep the government operating through Dec. 11.
In recent months, lawmakers have been considering various changes to the program, such as raising the minimum investment amount. Currently, investors are required to invest $1 million or a discounted amount of $500,000 in “targeted employment areas,” or zones designated as having high unemployment. Other changes could place restrictions on TEA designation.
The EB-5 legislation currently contains 40 pages of changes, according to Ron Klasko, a managing partner at Klasko Immigration Law Partners.
For New York developers, proposed changes to TEAs are particularly worrisome since many of them have taken advantage of the discounted investment amount by creating special districts linking their projects to low-income neighborhoods.
“From the point of view of New York developers, almost all of them have, in the past, qualified for the $500,000 reduced investment amount of the TEAs,” Klasko said. “Many of them will not qualify for that under this new law, meaning investors would have to invest $1 million. That’s an issue.”
The legislation would also allot a certain number of visas to different investment categories, such as 2,000 visas for projects in rural areas and 2,000 visas for people who invest $1 million.
“There have been long waiting lists for investors in China when they were competing for 10,000 visas,” Klasko said. “Now many of them for the New York projects will be competing for 4,000 visas.”
There’s little chance the bill will not pass, he said, since it’s part of the government’s omnibus bill. Meanwhile, developers and investors are sitting tight. “Until we have the final law,” said Klasko, “There won’t be a lot of activity.”
China’s Central Bank is moving forward with capital markets reforms that could make it easier for Chinese citizens to invest in South Florida real estate.
The country’s monetary policymakers announced on Friday they may soon allow residents of a Shanghai free-trade zone to buy overseas assets directly – a trial run for the rest of China and part of a broader effort to loosen capital controls.
The move would also open up Yuan-denominated bonds to foreign companies. Chinese citizens currently face tight limits on the amount of money they can invest abroad. Those looking to convert funds from Yuan into Dollars to buy, say, an apartment in Brickell, often have to do so through companies or by smuggling cash to Hong Kong.
The announcement comes despite an uptick in capital outflows from China in recent months, which would normally provide an incentive to tighten capital controls.
In September alone, investors pulled $194 billion from the country, according to Bloomberg. “A lot of people suggested that if the economy slows, if there’s more volatility, the Chinese will drop the reforms,” Andy Rothman, an investment strategist at fund manager Matthews Asia, told Bloomberg.
“I don’t think that’s the way the Chinese government views it. They are not worried about the scale of the outflows.” ISG World, an Aventura-based brokerage, recently partnered with one of China’s top real estate firms that has more than 60,000 agents spread throughout 17 cities.
It’s the latest move in Miami’s real estate market, where eyes have turned to Asia now that a strengthening U.S. dollar has sapped the energy of South American investors.
Bonsai is a Japanese word that means “planted in a container.” Bonsai gardening is a horticultural art form that involves growing small plants into tiny trees. The gardener’s objective is to coax a plant into the shape and appearance of a tree with branches and leaves. Gardeners use a variety of growing techniques to direct this beautiful and innovative growth. Bonsai gardening is popular among people of all ages, and it is easily performed in the comfort of one’s home during any season of the year.
Bonsai” may be a Japanese word, but this art form began in China. Hundreds of years ago, Chinese people pursued a special type of gardening that involved growing tiny trees in containers. In the beginning, only the top echelon of Chinese society pursued this form of gardening. Later, as Japanese people borrowed heavily from Chinese culture, bonsai became a popular hobby in Japan. Bonsai eventually moved west into Europe and then into the United States. A bonsai tree was featured in the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, which illustrates the rise of bonsai in the West.
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Renewal of the program – which awards a U.S. green card to foreigners who invest $500,000 into the U.S. economy – was part of a short-term spending bill approved by the House of Representatives Friday. The bill, approved by the Senate on Thursday, will keep the government running through Dec. 16while lawmakers negotiate the $1.15 trillion budget, of which EB-5 is a small component.
“From the point of view of New York developers, almost all of them have, in the past, qualified for the $500,000 reduced investment amount of the TEAs,”Klasko said. “Many of them will not qualify for that under this new law, meaning investors would have to invest $1 million. That’s an issue.”
“There have been long waiting lists for investors in China when they were competing for 10,000 visas,”Klasko said. “Now many of them for the New York projects will be competing for 4,000 visas.”
China’s Central Bank is moving forward with capital markets reforms that could make it easier for Chinese citizens to invest in South Floridareal estate.