The Hindu Business Line : Millennium Spire plans to speed up pan India investment

Coimbatore, Feb. 8 Real Estate Investment Fund-Millennium Spire is in the process of accelerating its investment allocation opportunities in the Indian market. This Singapore domiciled investment vehicle envisages pan India investment in excess of $1 billion with initial focus on Coimbatore and NCR regions.

Unveiling the launch of its second fund-Millennium Spire II, Mr Ashish Bhalla, Managing Director, Millennium Spire India, said: “We do not believe in land acquisition, only project development. Our mandate is to unlock the potential of the land. Millennium Spire is a professionally managed investment fund, not real estate developers,” he reiterated.

Investment opportunities

Some key factors that seem to have propelled Millennium Spire’s presence in India are the attractive investment opportunities and the investment required in the real estate and infrastructure domains.

According to Mr Bhalla, the real estate scenario was entering a mature phase, characterised by projects planned by actual end users rather than speculative investors. “We have moved away from land-based approach to focus on efficient delivery of value engineering.”

Millennium Spire has completed three investments (all in the National Capital Region) and a couple of additional ones are said to be in the pipeline. “We have deployed $50 million in the first fund. The second fund, built on the success of the first, would be on a much larger scale,” he said and added that the fund’s primary focus would be in residential and mixed use projects with secondary focus on opportunistic, commercial and office development.

Industrial township

“We have initiated an inner mixed use project of landmark value and knowledge-based industrial township in tandem with the manufacturing and textile units here,” he said.

To a query, he said: “Only about $700 million was invested last year against the total availability of $25 billion by the 38-odd FDI real estate investment funds.” On poor deployment, he simply said: “lack of transparency.”

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