Investors lead the rush back into India's offices

Mumbai

WORK-from-home will be a passing fad in India - at least that's what investors are signalling.

Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and the Monetary Authority of Singapore are the lead investors in the initial public offering (IPO) of Mindspace Business Parks.

That's a solid endorsement from a country that has championed such tightly-regulated real estate investment trusts (Reits).

The Mumbai debut will value Mindspace, which counts K Raheja and Blackstone as investors, at up to US$2.2 billion.

It builds on last year's successful listing of the larger Embassy Office Parks, India's first publicly traded real estate trust also backed by Steve Schwarzman's Toronto-based investor.

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Since its float last April, the Reit has delivered a total shareholder return of 22 per cent, Eikon data showed. In comparison, the Nifty 50 Index delivered a negative 3 per cent over the same period.

Chunky payouts have helped: Embassy's stock offers an almost 7 per cent yield, higher than coupons on India's 10-year bonds.

Mindspace looks set to be equally generous. The commercial property company has total leasable area of 29.5 million square feet spread across Greater Mumbai and beyond, and tenants include affiliates of Amazon and Facebook.

The IPO, likely to price at the top of the range, will prise open a hard-to-access part of the real estate sector dominated by large funds.

Indian office space looks appealing in normal times. New projects have kept a measured pace with demand compared to the oversupplied and fragmented residential market.

Local tenants tend to sign contracts of at least five years that usually include a price hike every three years. A further increase usually comes when the contracts end and are renewed.

Covid-19 has kept many Indians from returning to the office but Embassy and Mindspace have continued to collect over 95 per cent of rents in recent months.

The pandemic might make the medium-term outlook even better. A labour shortage and developers facing a financing squeeze could see supply fall significantly, for example.

At the start of the outbreak, global companies initially embraced working from home.

But many are now turning cautious on the merits of remote working as productivity starts to fade and maintaining a workplace culture grows harder. India's patchy Internet does not help. For now, well-heeled investors are leading the rush back into offices.

India's Mindspace Business Parks, a real estate investment trust backed by Blackstone Group, allotted units worth 26.4 billion rupees (S$487 million) to anchor and strategic investors as part of the commercial property group's initial public offering, stock exchange filings published on July 24 and July 25 showed.

Investors, led by Singaporean sovereign investment vehicles, paid 275 rupees per unit across the two tranches.

The company is aiming to raise as much as 45 billion rupees, or about US$603 million, including proceeds from a public offer which opened on July 27 and will close on July 29. REUTERS