India's Milestone Capital gets new real estate CEO
India's Milestone Capital Advisors has named Alok Aggarwal as managing partner and chief executive officer of its real estate business.
Aggarwal - a former director with Sun-Area Property Partners, a joint venture between Ares Management and Sun Group - is to oversee all funds in the real estate development, mezzanine and real estate investment trust (REIT)-like structures.
The firm has been looking for someone to head its real estate business since its director and managing partner Ashish Joshi left in December 2012.
Milestone has INR32 billion ($514 million) in assets under management across seven funds and manages investments into over 25 million square feet of real estate projects. The firm will return to the market this year, seeking INR4-5 billion, with the option of another INR2 billion.
"It will be core assets - we believe there are opportunities because the commercial market is pretty much at a low and can only go up from here," Ruby Arya, current director and vice chairman at Milestone, told AVCJ in November. "We will probably focus on commercial ready assets, mainly office buildings."
Arya took over the reins at Milestone following the death of the company's late founder, her husband, Ved Prakash Arya in a freak accident in August 2011. The business has since focused on exits, particularly of its non-real estate investments.
In February, Milestone sold Ecofirst Advisory Services, an engineering consultancy business, for an undisclosed amount to Tata Consulting Engineers. In March, Quadria Capital Investment Advisors, an Asia-focused healthcare private equity fund, acquired Milestone Religare, which runs a INR4.5 million healthcare and education fund.
"We felt that in order to continue building this organization it was important to show full-cycle capability. We were able to return $250 million out of the total corpus of $850 million, with a mid-to-high teens IRR," said Arya. "The market has been challenging but I inherited a good set of investments."
More on South Asia
Latest News
Asian GPs slow implementation of ESG policies - survey
Asia-based private equity firms are assigning more dedicated resources to environment, social, and governance (ESG) programmes, but policy changes have slowed in the past 12 months, in part due to concerns raised internally and by LPs, according to a...
Singapore fintech start-up LXA gets $10m seed round
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) has led a USD 10m seed round for Singapore’s LXA, a financial technology start-up launched by a former Asia senior executive at The Blackstone Group.
India's InCred announces $60m round, claims unicorn status
Indian non-bank lender InCred Financial Services said it has received INR 5bn (USD 60m) at a valuation of at least USD 1bn from unnamed investors including “a global private equity fund.”
Insight leads $50m round for Australia's Roller
Insight Partners has led a USD 50m round for Australia’s Roller, a venue management software provider specializing in family fun parks.