Blackstone to Buy Willis for $1.3 Billion

CHICAGO—Blackstone Group LP has agreed to buy the iconic Willis Tower for $1.3 billion, the most ever paid for a US office building outside of Manhattan, the Wall Street Journal reported last night. The sellers, New York-based Joseph Chetrit and Joseph Moinian and Skokie, IL-based American Landmark Properties paid $841 million for the building, then known as the Sears Tower, in 2004. The seller and its representatives could not be reached by press time.

Lately Blackstone has concentrated on selling the assets it still holds as a result of its $39 billion leveraged buyout of Sam Zell‘s Equity Office Properties Trust in 2007. In 2014, the New York private-equity firm sold a set of Boston skyscrapers for more than $2 billion to Canadian investor Oxford Properties Group and the asset-management arm of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., and it recently sold a set of Silicon Valley office buildings to Google Inc. Also in 2014, Blackstone agreed to sell 1095 Ave. of the Americas in Manhattan for about $2.25 billion to a venture led by Canadian property investor Ivanhoé Cambridge.