Equinox Fitness Is Buying Rest of Millennium’s Gyms

Equinox Fitness Is Buying Rest of Millennium’s Gyms. The Reebok Sports Club/NY gym is one of several properties Equinox Fitness has acquired in a $110 million deal.Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times

The high-end fitness industry may be awash in trendy concepts — CrossFit, boot camps and the like — but one of the biggest players in the luxury gym market is continuing to expand all the same. Equinox Fitness, the purveyor of expensive workout centers and risqué advertising, said it planned to announce as soon as Monday that it had acquired Sports Club/LA gyms in New York and four other cities, as well as the Reebok Sports Club/NY gym on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. All will soon bear the Equinox brand and feature the company’s classes and products.

The $110 million deal, Equinox’s second-biggest acquisition, is for the remaining gyms owned by Millennium Partners, the real estate company that sold half of its clubs to Equinox three years ago. That transaction was Equinox’s biggest deal. More important, the new deal expands Equinox’s empire to 73 locations worldwide, primarily in major cities like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London.

Much has changed for Equinox since 2011, when it bought the first of the Sports Club/LA and Reebok Sports Club locations for $130 million. The company also bought SoulCycle, the popular spinning chain, and started the low-cost Blink Fitness brand, in an effort to grow in an economy recovering from recession.

Both are performing well, according to Harvey Spevak, the company’s chief executive, with SoulCycle now operating 29 locations and Blink having opened more than two dozen gyms in New York and New Jersey. He declined to elaborate on the privately held company’s performance, except to say that its growth remains strong.

Still, the most popular fitness trends today tend to be less luxurious than what Equinox has traditionally offered: CrossFit practitioners call their gyms “boxes” and eschew fancy machines for cold, hard iron. But Mr. Spevak argued that Equinox would continue to focus on its core offerings, while still covering seemingly durable fitness movements like yoga and spinning.

“A lot of the noise that’s out there will dissipate over time,” he said. “We’re not feeling pressure from those.”

Instead, Equinox is focused on introducing more advanced technology to help customers track their workouts and diets, including through an app for iPhones. And it still will position itself as a luxury experience for members; after all, it still sells Kiehl’s cosmetics in its gyms, and will soon do so in its newest acquisitions.

“We will be much more sophisticated than anyone else in our industry,” Mr. Spevak said.