Indian PE Giant Xander Group Buys Bangalore Office Tower For $55M

GIC was reported to be buying an office portfolio in Bangalore for $200 million earlier this week, and it appears that the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund is not the only investor betting on the continuing growth of the southern India city’s commercial sector.

Indian private equity firm Xander Group is also taking an interest in the high tech centre’s need for space, having purchased an office building in Bangalore for 3.5 billion rupees ($55 million) earlier this month from Sanjay Ghodawat Group.

Xander’s new office tower Pinehurst is located in the Embassy Golf Links Business Park in Bangalore, about 20 minutes drive from the capital of southwestern India’s Karnataka state’s central business district. The 250,000-square-foot (23,226-square-metre) building is fully leased to investment firm Fidelity India, according to local media reports.

Investors Attracted to Bangalore Business Parks

Home to global firms including Goldman Sachs, IBM and Microsoft, Embassy Golf Links Business Park, is one of the largest IT-specific business parks in Bangalore.

Prestige, which is said to be selling its $200 million set of offices to GIC, is also a major business park developer in the city, having developed some 3.2 million square feet of space across seven office towers in its own suburban township there.

The Pinehurst building received strong interest from a number of bidders, suggesting that both international and domestic institutions in India are aggressively seeking grade A pre-leased office assets, said Gagan Randev, National Director of Capital Markets & Investment Services at Colliers International India, who brokered the deal on behalf of the seller in a statement.

Xander Group, which focuses on real estate, retail, infrastructure, hospitality, and credit, is buying the building as it expands its $500 million office platform in the country.

Investment Firm Expands Real Estate Portfolio

Founded in 2005, the Xander Group has committed over $ 2.7 billion of equity capital to the Indian market since its establishment. Xander’s retail arm, Virtuous Retail South Asia operates four shopping centres in Surat, Bangalore, Punjab and Chennai. Virtuous received $175 million in equity investment from Dutch pension fund manager APG Asset Management in November.

Bangalore, which is a centre for India’s software outsourcing industry, accounted for 36 percent of India’s international grade office leasing in 2017 according to a recent Colliers report. There were more than 15 million square feet (1.4 million square metres) leased in the city last year out of 42.8 million square feet (3.9 million square metres) nationwide.