The Capitalist fervor in India has, not surprisingly, a real estate component. The development business--the construction of new commercial, industrial and residential properties--is growing at least 25 per cent a year, says a report by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry and Ernst & Young. That puts it at a minimum $5 billion worth of projects over the next couple of years. High rents in Mumbai place the city firmly in the top ten most expensive office markets, along with London, Hong Kong and Tokyo.
Big international players are piling in, like Singapore developer Ascendas and the U.S.' Apollo Real Estate Advisors. Dubai's Emaar Properties, which is building the world's tallest tower, in Dubai, has invested $500 million in an Indian joint venture.
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If you want in, you will encounter barriers. Foreigners still cannot directly own Indian property; nor may they own shares of companies listed on Indian exchanges. But they can buy shares of foreign entities that do business in India as partners of Indian developers, or of the Indian realty companies listed on the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange. Such AIM-listed companies raised $4 billion in the past two years, with another $5 billion expected this year.
The table lists four such firms, which are developing projects themselves or in partnership with other Indian builders. They are all on the AIM, which is accessible to Americans, at a price. Discounter Charles Schwab & Co., for example, requires a minimum investment order of $5,000 and charges a commission of $100 or 0.5%, whichever is higher.
Sure, the disclosure is scant and AIM has a funky reputation. These four, at least, have been vetted by Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj, a joint venture of well-regarded British and Indian real estate money managers operating out of New Delhi.
Note that they are trading at or below book value, which was calculated by FORBES using company financial documents with property values derived from recent appraisals (not the historical cost basis often used for U.S. real estate). The companies' portfolios consist of raw land and half-completed and finished projects. The companies, some with huge workforces, aren't like U.S. real estate investment trusts, where most of the earnings pass through to investors. They keep the money to cover growth costs. Don't expect a lot of transparency here, however. The financial statements don't show anything comparable to a U.S. earnings or funds-from-operations figure.
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Trikona Capital, in business four years, listed its investment unit, Trikona Trinity Capital, on AIM last year after an offering that raised $465 million. The company strikes up partnerships mainly by investing in seasoned Indian developers, although it has started acquiring land to build on its own. At this point it has committed all of its capital, starting with $100 million in August 2006 that was put into Infrastructure Leasing & Finance Services, a Mumbai developer of infrastructure and other projects. Among the dozen projects Trinity has under way are a luxury hotel in Mumbai, a residential and commercial complex outside the city and an infotech park in Delhi.
Unitech Corporate Parks has the biggest land bank, with 10,000 acres heavily concentrated in the region around the capital, New Delhi. Hirco, strong around Mumbai, wins kudos from Jones Lang for its solid management.
Venture capitalist Aashish Kalra and investment banker Rak Chugh started Trikona Capital in 2003. The name ("trinity" in Hindi) refers to its trilogy of infrastructure, housing and commercial investments.
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Who knows when India will get its real estate crash, but for now Trikona is coining money. According to Numis Securities analyst Colette Ord in London, Trikona's net asset value (assets minus debt) increased 32% in its first year as a public entity, ahead of their 25% target. Trikona, she says, has the largest number of deals and developer-partners of any aim-listed Indian realty outfit.
Even with the welcome mat laid out, Indian real estate isn't for the fainthearted. Kalra and Chugh grew up in India and thought they knew how things worked, but they had more than their share of problems at the outset. The country ranks 120th out of 178 for ease of doing business, according to a World Bank analysis. The two didn't pull off their first deal for three years. One investment is with a developer who needed 12 years to track down the hundreds of deeds for a property outside Mumbai, where he's building a residential, commercial and office project.
Kalra and Chugh have been friends since their days at the Doon School, an elite boarding school for boys in northern India. Many of their classmates, sons of India's wealthy families, are now in investment banking, politics or a family real estate business.
"It helped that we came from the right families and went to the right schools," says Chugh, 38, the much more reserved of the pair, who was the head of a fixed-income structuring group at Lehman Brothers in New York. "We knew who to call to get those first interviews [to pitch our proposals]."
The garrulous Kalra, 35, recalls getting regular dinner invitations to the houses of prospective business partners in Mumbai and New Delhi. A bachelor until recently, he thought the dinners were a chance to sell Trikona's ideas. Turns out he was being vetted as a prospective groom.
Trikona hired 50 people in India and put in charge a former chief executive of Jardine Fleming's asset management operations in India, Mahesh Gandhi, who had been running his own real estate advisory firm for several years.
Chugh and Kalra are developing a pipeline into the network of secretive family-run business groups that are usually the first to know about new deals coming up. It was Gandhi who helped clinch the firm's first deal, to buy into one of Mumbai's biggest developers, the Keystone Group. The $25 million investment wasn't large, but Trikona's managers needed to get it done to establish themselves with Boman Irani, chairman of Keystone.
The relationship was tested as they negotiated a second deal, to bid for the redevelopment of some residential properties in a prime district of south Mumbai. "[Irani] told me the bid was closing the next morning at 11:45," recalls Gandhi. In one night he signed 700 pages of documents. The next morning he discovered on his way to work that there were even more documents. Messy, yes, but worth the hassle.
