Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC) — the country’s largest mortgage financier — has entered into a two-stage agreement with online classifieds platform Quikr under which HDFC will first transfer its entire stake in HDFC Realty and HDFC Developers to Quikr for a 3.3% stake in the latter — in an all-stock deal.
Both HDFC Realty — an offline brokerage business and HDFC Developers (which runs online real estate classifieds platform HDFC RED) are 100% subsidiaries of HDFC.
With 30 million monthly users, Quikr is one of the largest classifieds platform that runs multiple vertical businesses across real estate, automobiles, jobs, services and goods. Its real estate vertical ‘Quikr Homes’ generates 3.5 million unique visitors every month.
Post-integration of HDFC Realty and RED, Quikr will become India’s leading online-to-offline real estate platform and offer consumers end-to-end home buying services, according to a statement from HDFC.
‘Robust platform’
“We are happy to associate with Quikr,” said Renu Sud Karnad , managing director, HDFC. “The future of real estate is ‘digital’ and Quikr has built a robust technology platform for consumers with products for developers and brokers who stand to benefit in the post-RERA regime.”
Separately, HDFC Capital Advisors Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of HDFC, has achieved the initial closure of its second affordable housing fund, the HDFC Capital Affordable Real Estate Fund — 2. This will be combined with the HDFC Capital Affordable Real Estate Fund – 1 raised in 2016 to create a $1 billion platform targeting affordable and mid-income residential projects in India’s leading 15 cities.
The primary objective of this platform, headed by Vipul Roongta, CEO, HDFC Capital Advisors, is to provide long-term equity and mezzanine capital to marque developers at the land and pre-approval stage for the development of affordable and mid-income housing in India.
