The Blackstone Group has sold its 45-acre La Quinta Resort & Club in the Coachella Valley for $255 million.
The New York-based private equity firm made the sale to Henderson Park, a hedge fund in London, according to Bisnow, which cited Real Capital Analytics. Local property records show the deal was done with a $162-million loan from Morgan Stanley of New York.
The La Quinta property – 22 miles southeast of Palm Springs and a 10 minute drive to the site of the annual Coachella music festival in Indio – has 617 hotel rooms, 98 villas and 190,000 square feet of meeting space. There also are 21 tennis courts and 41 swimming pools, surrounded by world-class golf courses – a number of which Blackstone sold separately in earlier deals.
Hotel guests have access to play all the courses.
The historic golf resort played a part on a season of “The Bachelorette,” and has long hosted PGA tours. When the La Quinta Hotel opened in 1926, the daily green fee for its 9-hole course was $1. It soon became a Hollywood getaway for such stars as Greta Garbo, Clark Gable and Shirley Temple.
Henderson Park was launched in 2016 by Mount Kellett executive Nick Weber, who managed to whip up $500 million in equity while working out of his local Starbucks.
Since then, the firm has been a significant investor in European hotels. It bought the Westin Paris-Vendôme in 2018 for $628 million and is now selling it for close to $913.5 million, according to Bisnow. Last year, it bought a portfolio of 12 Hilton hotels in the United Kingdom, and set up a new platform to manage the business.
The La Quinta deal marks its first on this side of the Atlantic.
[Bisnow] – Dana Bartholomew
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