Plum Island’s Pink House Inspires a Real Estate Fantasy

Several years ago, I called a real estate agent in my hometown, Newburyport, Mass., with (as one tends to bring to agents) a fantasy. I wanted to buy the Pink House.

I had first glimpsed this house as a child, from the back seat of the family station wagon en route to the beach. The foursquare single-family home sat alone on the road out to Plum Island, overlooking a vast flat landscape of pristine salt marsh. The sight unnerved me and became a mainstay of my nightmares: A lonely, unloved thing looming against a howling sky, its cupola a leering, all-seeing eye.

Over time, my unease had mellowed to familiarity, then affection, which deepened upon hearing its rumored back story: In 1925, a wife agreed to divorce her husband on the condition he build her an exact duplicate of the home they shared in town.

Because she didn’t specify where the house should go, he built it where it would cause her the most unhappiness: by itself, far from everything, no fresh running water (only salt). There’s a term for this: “spite house.”

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Aditya Birla Real Estate Fund looking to raise Rs1,000 crore

Aditya Birla Real Estate Fund has invested about Rs.90 crore in buying apartments in Signia Isles, a luxury residential project of Sunteck Realty Ltd in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex, according to two people familiar with the development.

With this, the Rs.1,100 crore fund has deployed its entire corpus across 13 transactions.

Having invested its maiden real estate fund, Aditya Birla Real Estate Fund, part of Aditya Birla Financial Services Group, is planning to go ahead and start raising its second fund early next year that will invest in residential projects. It is aiming to raise about Rs.1,000 crore.

Sunteck Realty is developing three luxury residential projects in Bandra-Kurla Complex—Signature Island, Signia Pearl and Signia Isles. Prices in Signia Isles are about Rs.42,000-45,000 a sq ft. Earlier this year, the Mumbai-based developer acquired another plot of land in the area to develop a premium commercial office project through a joint development model.

“Sales have been good in Signia Isles and we are planning to start delivery of the apartments in the project by mid-2016,” said Kamal Khetan, chairman and managing director, Sunteck Realty.

The investment has been made in the form of equity through non-convertible debentures (NCDs).

An Aditya Birla spokesperson declined to comment.

With the Sunteck Realty deal, Aditya Birla Real Estate Fund has done five transactions that involve bulk buying of apartments, said one of the people mentioned above. Both of them declined to be named.

In March, realty firm Ozone Group raised Rs.150 crore from the fund for its Metrozone project in Chennai, by selling residential stock in the project in a bulk-buying deal. It also bought stock worth Rs.85 crore in a suburban Mumbai project being developed by Radius Developers in a structured equity transaction.

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How News Corp Aims To Increase Its Digital Real Estate Services Revenues

The Digital Real Estate Services segment accounts for more than 35% of News Corp‘s valuation, in our estimation, and this segment derives revenues by selling online advertising services on its residential real estate and commercial property sites. The company is looking to grow in the property and home services category in Australia and a step towards this goal was its acquisition of 25% stake in tradie search site hipages, which helps people find electricians, plumbers and other home related services. While this is a small stake in a start up, it can complement News Corp’s residential real estate advertising business and is an indication of a larger strategy of increasing focus on the digital real estate business. A major acquisition of iProperty by News Corp’s REA, ((News Corp owned REA acquires iProperty for $414M, medianama.com, November 2015)) which is likely to be completed by the first quarter of 2016, could be the key driver of global revenues for this segment.

In September 2014, News Corp acquired Move, Inc., the company that operates the widely used realtor.com in the U.S. Given Move’s content advantage, the company felt that it was well-positioned to capitalize on the fast growing U.S. online real estate sector. News Corp’s Digital Real Estate business saw a 71% increase in its top line for Q1 FY 2016, including revenues realized through Move Inc. We expect revenues of this segment to increase from nearly $0.65 billion in 2015 to more than $1 billion by the end of our forecast period. The company is looking for avenues to grow this revenue aggressively and the latest investment in hipages seems to be part of this strategy. In addition to Australia (News Corp has a 61.6% stake in REA Group Limited operator of the Australian residential property website, realestate.com.au) and the U.S. (acquisition of Move, Inc.), the company is looking to expand its digital real estate business globally. In November 2014, News Corp acquired a 25% stake in the parent company of PropTiger.com, a digital real estate marketing platform in India, for $30 million. The Indian Real Estate market is expected to reach $180 billion by 2020, and the acquisition of PropTiger.com has given News Corp entry into this growing market.

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The smart money is getting out of real estate

Real estate investing is all about timing, and Sam Zell knows this better than anyone.

He sold his real estate firm, Equity Office, to Blackstone Group for $39 billion near the peak of the market. This was back in February 2007—only months before real estate credit markets started to spiral out of control.

He’s doing it again.

At the end of October, his real estate fund, Equity Residential, agreed to sell more than 23,000 apartment units to Starwood Capital for $5.4 billion. The sale represents over 20 percent of the Equity Residential portfolio.

The fund plans to sell another 4,700 apartment units in the near future. Most of the proceeds will be returned to investors in the form of a dividend sometime next year.

Another real estate fund managed by Zell, Equity Commonwealth, has sold 82 office properties worth $1.7 billion since February. The fund plans to raise another $1.3 billion by selling off more properties over the next few years.

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