NYC's Waldorf Astoria Won't Reopen Until 2025

Hilton Worldwide signed a 100-year contract in 2014 to manage Manhattan’s famous Waldorf Astoria hotel, just before China’s Anbang Insurance—a holding company without much commercial real estate experience—bought the landmark for $1.95B.

In 2017, Anbang closed the hotel and launched a project to convert much of it to luxury condos—they were going to be sold for $18M each—atop a new hotel that would become the flagship of the new Waldorf Astoria brand for Hilton.

Now, six years later, Hilton is managing nearly 30 Waldorf Astoria-branded hotels around the world, but not the original.

According to a report in the New York Post, outlet work on the hotel portion of the project has only just begun. The earliest the building will open is 2025, the report said.

The project has been mired in difficulty, starting when the holding company owning it was replaced in 2018 by another Chinese holding company. More recently, the chief executive in charge of the Waldorf project resigned after the price tag for the hotel/condo project ballooned to nearly $3B.

In 2016, Anbang acquired Blackstone’s Strategic Hotels & Resorts portfolio in a $5.5B deal as part of a rapid expansion strategy by Anbang that preceded a crackdown by China on over-leveraged foreign investments.

In 2017, Anbang was seized by the Chinese government after its chairman was arrested and charged with corruption. In June 2019, the finance ministry’s China Insurance Security Fund create Dajai Insurance, giving it an identical structure and the same shareholders as Anbang—including the Security Fund, which owns 98% of the entity.

Dajai agreed in 2019 to go through with a transaction negotiated by Anbang to sell the entire Strategic hotel portfolio to South Korea’s Mirae Asset Financial Group, but the $5.8B deal unraveled after the outbreak of the pandemic crippled the hospitality sector.

The collapse of the deal resulted in a lawsuit that was settled in December 2020 when a Delaware judge ruled that the Chinese company had to refund Mirae’s $582M deposit.

In September, Dajai put three high-profile resort hotels in the US on the market, aiming for a combined sale price of $1.3B. Two of the assets were Four Seasons resorts—in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and in Scottsdale, AZ—and the other is the Montage, a resort in Laguna Beach, CA.

Last year, Dajai US CEO Andrew Miller, the top U.S. executive overseeing the Waldorf project resigned, reportedly in a dispute with the company over cost overruns.