Kotak’s realty arm makes $350m exit

Despite a tough realty market, Kotak Realty Fund an arm of the alternate investment fund of the Kotak Mahindra group, has made successful exits from all its portfolios of realty projects and returned its investors about $350 million (about Rs 2,600 crore at the current exchange rate). The fund was floated with an objective of investing in structured credit in the domestic real estate market and had funded projects across Mumbai, NCR, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, a top official at Kotak Investment Advisors, the managers to the fund, said. “Most of the projects that we financed were residential projects,” S Sriniwasan, MD of the company, said. “We invested through 2012 to 2014 and drew about $220 million of about $350 million (that was committed by the fund’s investors)thanks to the credit growth of NBFCs in the past few years, about 70% of the total exits from this fund was re-finance exits,” Sriniwasan said. This is the largest real estate fund exit in India in terms of the amount of money that was managed. With the full exit from this fund, Till date Kotak has fully wound up four funds. The aggregate exits generated by Kotak across funds and investments are in excess of Rs 6,000 crore. This is the largest volume of exit by any Indian Real Estate Fund Manager across various funds, the official said.