ICICI Venture Funds Management, the PE arm of private sector bank ICICI Bank, plans to raise around Rs 1,000 crore from high net worth individuals and domestic banks for its second real-estate fund, the India Advantage Fund Two, in the next six to nine months. The fund raised will be invested in residential real estate projects of mid-sized developers in top-tier cities such as Delhi-National Capital Region, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Chennai.
ICICI Venture is a leading private equity firm with a corpus in excess of 42 billion, which was raised in 2005 and focused on residential, commercial and mixed land-use projects including Express Tower in Mumbai and IT SEZ in Hyderabad.
On the decision to hike repo and reverse repo rates by 25 basis points by Reserve Bank, Sanjeev Dasgupta, ICICI Venture President, said that it would lead to increase in interest rates on home loans and rise in cost of funds for construction financing. Private Equity has become a preferential way among property developers to get funds.
Source:Silicon India