L.A. Firm Offers to Buy Imperial Hotel in Tokyo
Colony Capital, a Century City-based real estate investor, offered to buy control of Tokyo’s 114-year-old Imperial Hotel, the onetime address of choice in the Japanese capital for Bob Hope, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe.
The $9-billion fund is negotiating with UFJ Holdings Inc., the main lender to Kokusai Kogyo Co., to buy the hotel and transportation company’s 39.4% stake in Imperial Hotel Ltd., said Toshio Masui, the president of Colony’s Japanese operation.
Colony is also seeking to buy an 11% stake from individual shareholders, he said.
Two years of economic expansion in Japan are helping to lift property prices in central Tokyo from 13-year lows. Kokusai Kogyo, which also operates taxi and bus services, is selling the hotels to pay debt owed to UFJ, Japan’s fourth-largest bank.
“We need to buy at least a 51% controlling stake to push through the operational changes needed to boost the values of the properties over time,” Masui said, adding that there were other bidders for the assets. “At the current share price, the assets are quite expensive and we won’t pay that much.”
Mitsubishi Tokyo, Japan’s biggest bank by market value, may soon conclude a plan to take over UFJ, said Naoki Hirokawa, a UFJ spokesman. The combination, which would create the world’s largest bank by assets, was sought by UFJ a month after regulators censured it for concealing documents detailing its $36 billion of bad loans.
Nobuyuki Furukawa, a spokesman for Tokyo-based Kokusai Kogyo, declined to comment on a sale of the Imperial Hotel stake or potential bidders.
“We’ve had no talks with Colony, not even an approach from the fund,” Furukawa said.
Founded in 1890, the Imperial Hotel was later rebuilt by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. When Marilyn Monroe stayed at the hotel in 1954 with her husband, baseball player Joe DiMaggio, thousands of admirers broke through the glass wall of the lobby to get a closer look at her.
Bob Hope stayed at the hotel in 1950.
The hotel was taken down in 1968 after the building’s structure was found to be unsafe, with some parts kept for a new hotel on the original site and other parts rebuilt.
Apart from the 1,057-room Imperial Hotel and an adjacent office tower, Kokusai Kogyo also owns the Imperial Hotel in Osaka and the Kamikochi Imperial Hotel in Nagano prefecture, north of Tokyo.
