Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Property Trust Inc. agreed to buy a General Electric Co. energy-finance business for $2.56 billion to expand beyond real estate holdings.

The acquisition includes a roughly $2.1 billion portfolio of 51 loans backed by assets such as pipelines, power plants and wind farms, as well as $400 million of unfunded commitments, Starwood and GE said Wednesday in separate statements, confirming an earlier report by Bloomberg. The project-finance debt unit — and its 21-person team — is part of GE Capital’s Energy Financial Services business, according to Bloomberg.

The GE unit is attractive because its holdings are comprised almost entirely of floating-rate loans, which are favored in an environment of rising interest rates. The business is expected to create new loans with an average duration exceeding five years — at least twice that of the typical debt in Starwood’s commercial real estate portfolio.

Starwood has been searching for a way to diversify for almost seven years, said Sternlicht, who serves as the real estate investment trust’s chairman and chief executive officer. In an interview, he said he wants to ensure the company’s performance isn’t tied too tightly to the real-estate cycle, after he watched certain mortgage REITs that were too narrowly focused succumb to the 2008 financial crisis.

“Obviously, we want to be involved in businesses that share the characteristics of real estate such as earning the vast majority of cash flows from creditworthy entities and using real assets as collateral,” he said. The Starwood trust will “continue to look at other opportunities” outside energy and real estate he said, declining to elaborate.