Reports out of New York over the weekend have claimed that the Dalian Wanda Group, China’s largest commercial real estate developer, is to shutter its New York office by the end of November and will run its U.S. operations from Beijing.
Wanda has been running its operations out of an office at RXR Realty and Blackstone Group’s 1330 Sixth Avenue office.
It is not clear why the Chinese giant is leaving New York, or whether the step has any impact on its investments in the city. Sean Muellers, Wanda’s chief U.S. representative, will leave the firm after three years at the end of November.
In 2012, Wanda bought the AMC movie theater chain for $2.6 billion. Last year, it announced a $1.2 billion mixed-use development in Beverly Hills and acquired a development site in Chicago with plans to develop a $900 million mixed-use tower. Unlike rival Chinese developers like Greenland Holdings, China Vanke or Soho China, Wanda has no stake in major New York real estate projects. In 2013, Reuters reported that the firm wanted to build a $1 billion hotel in Manhattan, but the plans apparently never came to fruition.
Wanda like many other Chinese developers has been affected by the recent fluctuations on the Chinese domestic market
