Prozone Intu Properties which is a joint venture between Mumbai based malls develop Prozone and UK’s Intu Properties has said that it will purchase malls in India’s prominent cities and metro’s.
Many private equity majors such as Blackstone, Xander-APG, Singapore’s GIC sovereign fund and the Phoenix Mills-CPPIB alliance have already invested in many mall’s and are in the race to acquire more.
Nikhil Chaturvedi, managing director said that the BSE-listed Prozone Intu is planning to buy malls in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune and other major cities. He also said that they had finalized a few deals in Mumbai already.
Chaturvedi added that the firm owns malls in Aurangabad and Coimbatore, and is building a 500,000-sq. ft one in Nagpur
Financial giant Blackstone has already acquired eight malls in the past two years and has a portfolio of over 5 million sq. ft.
It is also planning to take that to 7 million sq. ft. It has a set up a separate company, Nexus Malls to operate these malls
Shobhit Agarwal, managing director at ANB Capital Advisors was quoted as saying that “Unlike office spaces, investors are not restricting themselves to the top seven to eight cities. With the economy showing signs of improvement, disposable income has started finding its way into branded goods, leading to better-performing retail malls. Also, expectations from mall owners, especially in tier-II and tier-III cities, are still not very high, allowing good entry points to investors,”
As per real estate consultancy JLL, 2017 saw a withdrawal of nearly 5 million sq. ft of retail space with the closing of 28 malls.
All malls are not doing well and it takes a trained business eye to spot the good ones from the failures. Prozone Intu is in the process of doing just that and zero in on malls which generate maximum revenue and profit.
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