Warburg Pincus Sets Up $1b JV For China Real Estate Special Situations

Warburg Pincus announced today that it has formed a $1 billion joint venture with a Beijing-based asset management firm for investing in distressed and “special situations” real estate opportunities in mainland China. The US private equity firm revealed the latest branch in its network of China real estate businesses in a joint statement with Hande Group, a 23-year-old privately held asset management and investment firm run by attorney Liu Xu, with the goal of building a portfolio of $5 billion in assets within three years. The vulture investment initiative comes less than three weeks after Warburg Pincus unveiled a new structured debt effort, to add to the more than $4 billion it has already invested in more than 20 mainland real estate ventures, including warehouse developer ESR, rental apartment startups Nova, Mofang and Ziroom, as well as numerous other developers, operators and asset managers.