Delhi-based DMI Alternatives, the alternative investment arm of non-bank lender DMI Finance Pvt. Ltd, said Friday its real estate-focussed fund has hit final close at Rs 1,600 crore ($250 million).
The fund, which has a tenure of nine years, will make structured debt and equity investments in land assets as well as under-construction properties. It will make 15-20 investments and will also consider portfolio-level investments, the company said in a statement.
The company didn't specify any details of the fundraising or who all invested in this fund.
This is the second alternative investment fund (AIF) of the firm and its first real estate-focussed fund. The company says it hasn’t yet launched its first fund, which was proposed to be a debt fund.
DMI Finance was founded in 2008 by former Citigroup executives Shivashish Chatterjee and Yuvraj Singh. The company has been in the real estate financing segment since then. In 2013, the Burman family of consumer goods maker Dabur India picked up a stake in DMI Finance.
The company has diversified in recent years. In 2014, it ventured into retail mortgage lending through DMI Housing Finance Pvt. Ltd. Last year, VCCircle reported that it was in final stages of talks to raise capital to roll out its digital lending arm. Also last year, it had planned to enter the stressed assets segment with a Rs 1,000-crore fund.
On Friday, the company also said that it has tied up with Noida developer Stellar Ventures to make investments. The two partners have put in money to develop commercial properties which are spread across 10 acres and have a leasable capacity of 1.3 million square feet.
Chatterjee, also a director at DMI Alternatives, said real estate appears to provide an interesting investment opportunity after many years.
“Widespread stress from a slow sales environment and a stronger regulatory regime ushered in by Real Estate Regulatory Act (RERA) and the National Company Law Tribunal are forcing asset sales. We think that, for patient capital, equity in real estate can be underwritten to more attractive returns than debt,†he said.
Stellar has developed 1.5 million square feet of office space for IT and IT-enabled service providers, director Akshay Sethi said. The tie-up with DMI will help in expanding the portfolio of high-quality commercial spaces, he said.
The statement said that Stellar has developed projects of 7 million square feet spread across residential and commercial projects, mostly in the Noida region, over the last two decades.
*The headline and text of this article have been changed based on additional inputs from the company.