Real estate services firm Anarock is planning to raise as much as ₹1,000 crore from private equity funds for potential acquisitions of proptech companies, two people aware of the development said.
Anarock, founded by former JLL India head Anuj Puri, offers residential, retail and commercial broking, investment banking, hospitality, land services, industrial and logistics, investment management, strategic advisory and valuations, project management and society-management services.
“Anarock has drawn up plans to raise as much as ₹700-1,000 crore from private equity funds. The fundraising will be entirely fresh capital and, currently, there is no plan to include a secondary share sale in this round,” one of the two people said, requesting anonymity. “The plan is to consolidate the proptech industry by acquiring struggling startups in the space. There are several proptech startups that are struggling to either scale up or are struggling to work out the right economics to make profits”.
“There are multiple acquisition opportunities that the company is seeing in the proptech space today. One is startups, which have very good business models but are not able to scale up because they don’t have the distribution network or the relationships. Second is where the founder is looking for an exit for personal reasons or where the founder and the investor are not getting along or where the investor’s fund has come to the end of the life of the fund, and the investor wants an exit,” the person said.
Puri did not respond to an email seeking comment.
In January, Anarock acquired society and apartment management platform ApnaComplex from NestAway Technologies for an undisclosed amount.
The Bengaluru-based startup offers society and apartment management services.
Anarock is one of the biggest companies in the proptech space and has an annual revenue of ₹400 crore, the second person said.
“The company generates more than 2 million leads a year,” the person said, also requesting anonymity.
The company sold about 9,000 units in the first half of 2021, an 80% rise from a year earlier, the company said in a statement in October.
Of the total of ₹8,084 crore worth of inventory sold, affordable housing constituted 20% of sales. The average ticket size of units sold in the first half was ₹90 lakh across 13 cities.
Source: Mint