GLOBAL REPORT—DLF Limited on Sunday completed the sale of Amanresorts for $358 million.
The New Delhi-based real estate investment company sold its 100% equity stake in subsidiary company Silverlink Resorts’ ownership of the luxury resort brand to Aman Resorts Group, a joint venture between Amanresorts founder Adrian Zecha and Peak Hotels & Resorts Group. Zecha will chair the new group.
The management buyout did not include the Lodhi Hotel in Delhi, India, which remains part of DLF and is one of Amanresort’s handful of urban properties. Amanresorts has 26 resorts in such locales as Bhutan, Morocco, Sri Lanka, India, Cambodia, Montenegro and, most recently, Vietnam and Venice, Italy.
DLF paid $400 million for 97% of Amanresorts in 2007, after which it bought the remaining 3%, according to reports.
Founded in 1946, DLF is one of India’s largest real estate investment companies, but its core interests traditionally have not included the hospitality sector, according to Prakash Agarwal, an equity analyst at Malaysia-based Asian investment bank CIMB Group.
DLF was interested in a sale mostly “to de-leverage as they have a huge debt and decided to exit non-core assets,” he said.
In a DLF news release, Saurabh Chawla, the company’s executive director of finance, said the sale was “another major milestone in DLF’s strategy to focus on its core business of real estate and divest non-core businesses and assets.”
Amanresorts and DLF did not respond to request for comment by press time.