At least 16 real estate firms are set to come with their initial public offerings to raise Rs 9,000 crore in the next three months. “Going by the DRHPs submitted by the 16 real estate companies, they are planning to raise at least Rs 9,000 crore. This is going to be raised in the next three months,” Knight Frank India Chairman Pranay Vakil said on the sidelines of a Ficci-organised summit here. Vakil said that among the 16 issues, five-six are from the Southern India and a few from Northern India. Informed sources said that Sahara plans to raise Rs 3,450 crore through the IPO, Lodha Developers Rs 3,000 crore, Godrej Properties Rs 600 crore, DB Realty Rs 1,500 crore and Kumar Builders Rs 450 crore among others. Emmar MGF has also filed the DRHP with the SEBI and plans to raise Rs 3,850 crore.
Hoping that the issues would be reasonably priced, he said, “Hopefully, people will now realise that you can’t take away every single money from the market and they will keep something from the investors”. The Knight Frank Chairman said that there was ample liquidity, both from domestic and international sources, for the issues to sail through, but in case, one or two fails, it would be a disaster to the entire market. Vakil said that the banking sector lending to the real estate sector was going to be limited now as the apex bank raised provisioning norms. RBI had on November 5 proposed to increase the provisioning requirement for advances to the commercial real estate sector from 0.40 per cent to one per cent.
Stating that the Indian real estate industry is on the path of recovery, Vakil said that developers would do well to keep in mind the lessons learnt from the slowdown, which has proved beyond doubt that the liquidity and the consumers are the kings of the business. “We have also learnt that an investor is a fair-weather bird. When the industry is down, investors may look away from the developers,” Vakil said.
