Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. agreed to buy San Francisco’s Parc 55 and four other properties for $1.76 billion to defer capital gains taxes.

Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc., the world’s largest hotel operator, agreed to buy San Francisco’s Parc 55 and four other properties for $1.76 billion to defer capital gains taxes from its sale of New York’s Waldorf Astoria.

In addition to the 1,024-room Parc 55, the company is buying two hotels in Orlando, Florida, and two in Key West that are already managed by Hilton, according to a statement Wednesday. The sellers in the transaction include Hilton’s majority owner, Blackstone Group LP.

Hilton is making the acquisitions with some of the proceeds from its $1.95 billion sale of the Waldorf Astoria to China’s Anbang Insurance Group Co., which has been completed. Under U.S. tax-deferral rules, the McLean, Virginia-based company must complete its purchases with the proceeds within 180 days of the sale’s completion.

Selling in New York and buying in other markets is a way “to accelerate your room-revenue growth,” Nikhil Bhalla, an analyst at FBR & Co. in Arlington, Virginia, said in a telephone interview. Room revenue at Key West hotels, for example, has increased faster than the U.S. average and in New York, he said.

“New York has slowed, in great part due to all the new hotels that have been added,” he said. “In markets like Key West and San Francisco, it’s a very long and expensive process to build new product, which makes it a great argument to buy there.”

San Francisco

The Parc 55 is the fourth-largest hotel in San Francisco, a top U.S. lodging market. Hotel occupancies in the market encompassing San Francisco and San Mateo averaged 84.1 percent last year, compared with 64.4 percent for the U.S., according to STR Inc. The area ranked fifth in the U.S. last year for revenue per available room, a measure of rates and occupancy known as revpar.

The Florida Keys ranked third among U.S. markets tracked by STR for revpar. Key West hotels had an average occupancy rate of 87.1 percent, according to the Hendersonville, Tennessee-based research firm. Orlando was 36th out of 163 markets tracked by STR, with average occupancies of 73.8 percent.

The sellers of the Parc 55 include New York-based Blackstone and Rockpoint Group, a Boston-based real estate private-equity company. Blackstone also owns the two Key West resorts. The current majority owners of the Orlando properties are Chicago-based Gem Realty Capital and Farallon Capital Management, a San Francisco-based hedge-fund firm. Blackstone holds a minority interest in both properties.

Biggest Holder

Peter Rose, a spokesman for Blackstone, declined to comment beyond the Hilton statement. The company owns about 55 percent of Hilton, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, after taking it public in late 2013.

Hotel values have recovered to within 15 percent of their 2007 peak. Prices for properties in big cities climbed 15 percent during the past year, double the gain in smaller cities, according to indexes compiled by Moody’s Investors Service and Real Capital Analytics Inc.

Hilton’s acquisition is slated to close this month and the approximately $100 million that’s left of the proceeds from the Waldorf sale will be used to buy additional properties within the next six months, according to the statement.

The company’s shares rose 1.9 percent to $27.99 at 1:21 p.m. New York time. They have gained 29 percent in the past 12 months.