Macquarie

At a time when cash flows are weak owing to slump in home sales, real estate developers are relying heavily on external sources of capital to drive business. To ease the woes of Indian realty, it is reported that Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets (MIRA), an arm of Australia’s Macquarie Group Ltd, is set to invest in the domestic real estate market.

“Macquarie has been planning to invest in real estate in India for a while and has now created a special team to make investments in the sector. This is an appropriate time for Macquarie to start investing because there is a lot of demand for capital, particularly equity, and valuations are reasonable after a long spell of deceleration,” said a source familiar with the development.

MIRA has appointed R.K. Narayan as managing director of its Indian arm, Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets (India) Pvt. Ltd, to head real estate investments in India.

The company is in talks with Tata Housing Development Co. Ltd, for setting up an investment platform to invest in luxury residential projects. If the deal is successful, the partners may thrust at least $200 million of equity capital into it, though the shareholding may vary.

MIRA is a large infrastructure asset manager worldwide and its growing real estate portfolio includes 290 retail, commercial, residential and industrial properties in China, Mexico and Australia.

With this announcement, Macquarie joins a slew of other global investors like Warburg Pincus LLC, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and GIC Pte. Ltd who have already funded real estate projects in India through private equity during the first nine months this year.

Goldman sachs

Global Investment Bank, Goldman Sachs is planning to invest Rs 900 crore or $ 150 million as the minority stake in Piramal Realty, which is Mumbai based real estate developer. Currently, Piramal Realty owns more than 10 million square feet of residential as well as commercial projects under development stage and they all are located in the premier areas of Mumbai (One of the most expensive real estate market in the world).

According to official statement of the company, Piramal Realty will use this money to buy more properties and expand its real estate portfolio in Mumbai as well as in its suburbs. As per the statement of Anand Piramal, who is Executive Director of Piramal Group, “This investment is for the purpose of entity level.” The more he added that there will be four or more projects as the part of entity and two partners will participate in them. However; Anand Piramal didn’t disclose the size of the stake after investment of Goldman Sachs. This is second investment by any company in Piramal Realty with in less than one month time as previously Warburg Pincus LLC, a unit of private equity firm, had stated in July that it is planning to invest Rs 1,800 crore or $ 284 million for a minority stake in company.

In present, India is second most populous country in all over the country and it is among few of the fastest growing economies, which have to cater the demand of housing and apart from that there are consistent rise in the price of property market. As we all know that earlier in same month, a luxury residential apartment was fetch by Indian businessman in Mumbai at a record price of Rs 202 crore.