India's Milestone exits Pune commercial property
Indian private equity firm Milestone Capital Advisors has exited its stake in a 250,000 square foot commercial property in Pune for INR1.45 billion ($24 million).
The size of the stake was not disclosed.
The office building, located in the Kalyani Nagar district in the east of the city, was one of Milestone's first investments from IL&FS Milestone Fund I, a INR5.2 billion real estate fund which closed in 2008. The property currently houses companies such as Reliance Communications, Standard Chartered and Vodafone.
According to The Economic Times, the buyer is an unnamed high net worth individual. The property is said to have generated a 1.83x return for Milestone, including quarterly rental yields and capital appreciation.
This marks the first exit for Milestone Capital this year. Last year, the investor also sold its stakes in Bangalore-based developer Jain Heights & Structures and cleantech-focused consultancy Ecofirst.
Milestone has been looking to exit its earlier portfolio investments since Rubi Arya, current director and vice-chairman of Milestone, took over the firm following the death of the its founder, her husband, Ved Prakash Arya, in 2011.
"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," Arya told AVCJ in November. "The market has been challenging but I inherited a good set of investments."
At the same time Milestone is aiming to reach a first close of on its latest reality fund by the middle of this year. The firm hired Alok Aggarwal to lead its realty fund management business as managing partner and chief executive officer in January.
"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," said Arya. "We will probably focus on commercial ready assets, mainly office buildings, and we will be looking to raise INR4-5 billion with the option of another INR2 billion."
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