Westfield Corp., which operates malls in the Los Angeles area, around the nation and in Britain, is being sold to French commercial real estate giant Unibail-Rodamco in a $16 billion deal, the two companies announced today.

The cash-and-stock deal values shares of Australia-based Westfield at $7.55 a share, an 18 percent premium over Monday’s closing price.

Westfield’s 16 California locations include its Century City shopping center, which recently completed a $1 billion makeover, according to the Los Angeles Times. The company also owns Westfield Culver City, Westfield Topanga, Westfield Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks, Westfield Valencia Town Center in Santa Clarita, as well as Westfield Mission Valley, Westfield Horton Plaza and Westfield UTC malls in San Diego.

The deal makes it possible for Unibail-Rodamco, Europe’s largest publicly traded commercial real estate company, to expand into “new attractive real estate markets,” including London and wealthy areas of the U.S., Christophe Cuvillier, chief executive of Unibail-Rodamco, said in a statement.

Unibail-Rodamco owns and operates 69 shopping centers in Europe including in Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Munich.

The company began negotiations with Westfield about six weeks ago, the Australian company’s billionaire founder Frank Lowy said at a press conference Tuesday. The landlord saw an opportunity as the Lowy family sought to move from being managers to investors, Bloomberg reported. A spokeswoman for Unibail-Rodamco declined to comment.

“The deal shows that scale is essential in a market where mall-space requirements are changing rapidly, a motivation that also triggered the recent Hammerson-Intu deal,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Sue Munden wrote in a note Tuesday. The acquisition “creates a dominant European and U.S. mall operator with an unrivaled portfolio of destination malls and a portfolio value of $72 billion.”

Unibail-Rodamco was formed in 2007 from a merger of France’s Unibail and retail specialist Rodamco Europe, which was based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The company, run by Cuvillier since 2013, has been selling large office developments and weaker retail assets across Europe and reinvesting the money into developing new, dominant malls. The firm expects to sell a further $3.5 billion of assets over the coming years, according to a statement announcing the deal.

Unibail-Rodamco expects the Westfield purchase, due to complete in the first half of 2018, to result in savings and synergies of about 100 million euros annually, the company said in a statement. It is expected to be accretive to earnings in the first full year.

“People may have thought back in 2007 when Unibail and Rodamco got together that you can’t apply the skillsets” of being a mall landlord in different countries, Unibail-Rodamco Chief Financial Officer Jaap Tonckens said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “I think we’ve proven we can and we believe we’ll be able to do the same” with Westfield.

Still, some analysts argue the cash and stock offer that values Westfield at 18 percent more than Monday’s closing price is a high price, given the challenging times for the industry. The implied yield on the acquisition of less than 4 percent is aggressive as cap rates and yields are likely to be stable or rise in the U.S. and U.K., said Peter Papadakos, an analyst at Green Street Advisors in London.

Founded by Lowy in 1959, Westfield demerged its Australian and New Zealand assets from its U.S. and U.K. properties in 2014 as it sought to lure international capital for expansion. The firm has two malls in London and a stake in a development site for a third, make it the biggest private sector owner of shopping malls in the U.K. capital, according to broker Savills Plc. It’s the 12th largest U.S. retail property owner, according to data compiled by National Real Estate Investor in 2016.

City News Service and Bloomberg contributed to this report.