ASK Investment to enter realty

A year after it parted ways with Florida-based Raymond James, ASK Investment Holdings is getting ready to enter real estate investment advisory and private equity businesses. This marks its transition to a full-service wealth management firm that will specialise in succession planning by trust formation and management among other things.

The company, promoted by Asit Koticha and Sameer Koticha, has roped in Amit Bhagat from ICICI Home Finance to head the business. Bhagat was the head of the property services business at ICICI. The group has also hired Sunil Rohokale, earlier managing director at ICICI Home Finance, to oversee the business at a group level.

There will be three aspects to the business — managing funds, investment banking for real estate and advisory.

“When the economy is growing, people’s aspirations grow simultaneously. Demand for real estate will always be there. With the current interest rates, there may be some short-term problems. We are looking at the India growth story from a 20-50 years horizon,” said Sameer Koticha, director, ASK Investment Holdings.

The real estate advisory business will serve to complement its existing wealth management business and will be operational in the last quarter of 2008 or the first quarter of 2009.

“Equity and real estate are two critical asset classes of the wealth-creation process. We have conviction in real estate as an asset class, which has prominent place in long-term wealth creation. Our value proposition will help in managing corpus allocation for real estate through funds, clients’ requirements of sourcing and placing real estate assets and value adding through investment banking for advising to create better value or income of clients’ exisiting assets,” said Koticha.

The ASK group is also in the process of setting up its asset management business as it awaits approval from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi). It has appointed Sameer Kamdar, earlier with Mata Securities, to head and build the business.

The other area that ASK is looking at entering is the private equity business. It will take us about 3-6 months to identify an experienced person to lead the business,” said Koticha.

However, ASK has completely exited institutional broking after it sold the business to JM Financial Consultants for Rs 139 crore. In October last year, JM Financial Consultants had picked up a 60 per cent stake in the business for Rs 58.14 crore and bought over the entire business this year.