Gencom and White Bridge Capital have acquired the InterContinental Miami, a 652 room waterfront hotel at 100 Chopin Plaza, from an entity traced to Strategic Hotels & Resorts, owned by China’s Dajia Insurance Group. The buyers did not disclose the price. A person familiar with the matter put it at about $300 million, Bloomberg reported.
The 34 storey, 465,000 square foot property was built in 1983, has about 90,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor event space and a rooftop pool, and faces Biscayne Bay just south of the Brickell financial district. It has traded for the first time in more than 20 years: Strategic bought into the property in 2005, and Dajia’s link runs through Anbang Insurance Group’s $5.5 billion purchase of Strategic Hotels from Blackstone in 2016. The seller recently renovated the property, and the buyers plan to update the lobby and food and beverage areas.
Gencom, led by Karim Alibhai, oversees about $7 billion in assets managed or under development and owns the Ritz Carlton hotels in Coconut Grove and Key Biscayne. This is its third joint hotel investment with White Bridge in a year, after the InterContinental New York Times Square purchase for $230 million last December and a Ritz Carlton acquisition in Manhattan earlier this year.
The deal is a clean example of the current hospitality pattern: a Chinese insurer’s legacy US trophy asset passing to local owner operators with a value add plan, at a price the parties preferred not to print.