BS People: Gaurav Kumar & Nikhil Bhatia

Duo returns to Richard Ellis

At 35 and 37, Gaurav Kumar and Nikhil Bhatia, co-heads of capital markets, India at CB Richard Ellis South Asia, have many firsts to their credit.

Between 2005-06, both Kumar and Bhatia, who were at the helm of investment banking at CBRE, did a handful of landmark FDI (foreign direct investment) deals in Indian real estate, soon after the government allowed FDI in real estate. The duo set up investment banking operations at CBRE when not many international property consultants had such teams.

In 2006, both Kumar and Bhatia moved to global investor Credit Suisse to set up its real estate private equity operations in India. There, they invested around $ 200 million in three deals—one at the project level and two others in holding company levels.

Credit Cuisse has already undertaken a partial exit from the project level investment at Pune-based Vascon Engineers.

"We have seen the full cycle of investing in these transactions, managing assets and then exiting," says Bhatia. "All the three investments are in the money, Bhatia" adds.

That is not an insignificant achievement if you consider that apart from a few domestic fund managers such as those at HDFC, Kotak and Indiareit, only a handful of global investors like Credit Suisse have returned money to their investors.

Apart from working together at CBRE and Credit Cuisse, both were also the classmates at the premier B School IMI, so it’s not that surprising that CBRE hired Kumar and Bhatia to set up Capital Markets team and head them. "We understand both the buyers’ and sellers’ mindset as we have worked on the both sides", says Kumar.

However, the duo may require all of their investing and networking skills now when property markets are going through a drastic slowdown in cities such as Mumbai.

Stock markets are volatile, banks have become selective in lending while home sales and office leasing are on the decline. Competition from the other IPCs is also intense.

Now almost all IPCs—Jones Lang LaSalle, Knight Frank, DTZ— have strong capital market teams and Kumar and Bhatia will have to work hard to get deals. But the duo is not worried. "We did a lot of brain storming. There is a huge vaccum in the industry to manage assets of foreign funds as part of the asset management business at CBRE. CBRE has 15 years of presence of India and prudent relations with developers. We want to leverage on that", says Kumar.