Ashiana Housing raises Rs 200 crore via QIP to Fund New Projects

MUMBAI| NEW DELHI: Delhi based builder Ashiana Housing has raised Rs 200 crore from a clutch of institutional investors including Goldman Sachs and private equity firm Creador Advisors India through a qualified institutional placement (QIP) issue, said two people close to the development.

Ashiana Housing will finalise the allotment to institutional investors on Monday as the issue was oversubscribed, said one of the people quoted above. The company had recently received board approval to raise Rs 350 crore.

The company is looking at raising money for new projects, strengthening the organisation as well as for buying land, for which cheaper debt is currently not available.

Email queries to Goldman Sachs and Creador Advisors India did not elicit any response until the time of going to press. Religare Capital Market, which managed the QIP, declined comment for this story. Vishal Gupta, managing director of Ashiana Housing, too, declined comment

“Debt is not available for buying land today. The kind of debt that is coming into real estate is of the structured variety, which is very expensive,” said the second person, explaining why the company has looked at QIP as a fund raising option in the current market

This is one of the rare QIP issues in real estate, which has seldom seen entity-level investments coming in. Most fund raising by real estate firms over the last few years has been by way of SPV-level investments by private equity firms.

The QIP was subscribed by seven to eight investors, including mutual funds apart from Goldman Sachs and Creador. Most of the investors belong to the foreign institutional investor’s category.

Creador was set up by ex-Chrys Capital MD Brahmal Vasudevan and looks to invest in consumer-focused sectors with a long-term growth oriented view. It invests in India, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia and had raised its first fund of $130 million in 2013.

The real estate sector has seen a period of extremely slow sales over the last few quarters.