Bengaluru: Ivanhoé Cambridge, the real estate subsidiary of Canada’s second-largest pension fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), and the Embassy Group have launched a commercial office platform with an investment of $500 million.
This is Ivanhoe Cambridge’s first direct investment in India’s commercial office sector. “We would like to focus on commercial office and warehousing as the primary theme in India. The office sector has gone through a metamorphosis with institutional capital and ownership patterns having changed. Business campuses are getting more evolved. There has been an ongoing churn in the residential sector and it’s becoming more institutionalized,” said Chanakya Chakravarti, managing director, India, Ivanhoé Cambridge.
The Canadian investor had so far backed logistics and residential projects in India. In 2017, Ivanhoe Cambridge and Quadreal Property Group invested around $400 million in Logos India to modernize logistics facilities in India.
The investor, along with Piramal Enterprises Ltd, infused ₹500 crore in Lodha Group’s Palava township project in 2019, its first transaction, two years after it launched the Piramal Ivanhoe Residential Equity Fund.
Chakravarti said they took a strategic decision to pause investments from the joint fund with Piramal Enterprises, which in hindsight was a “good call”. “However, the partnership continues,” he said.
Ivanhoé Cambridge and Embassy will invest at a 80:20 ratio, with an initial focus on Bengaluru and Chennai. The platform will invest in develop-to-core and acquisition of partially developed business parks.
The development tenure of the platform is eight years while investments will be for a three-year period.
https://www.livemint.com/industry/infrastructure/ivanhoe-cambridge-to-focus-on-office-logistics-in-india-11614693531489.html
