Nitesh Estates to launch Rs 500 cr shopping mall

Nitesh Estates will soon launch a Rs 500 crore shopping mall at Indiranagar, Bangalore. In an exclusive interview with CNBC-TV18 Ashwini Kumar, COO of the company said the company would raise around Rs 160-170 crore from banks for this project.

Further, talking about the demand in the real estate market in Bangalore, he says the absorption in the residential segment in the past few quarters has been roughly about 9-10 billion square feet per quarter. "One would have normally expected the demand to rise but that has not been the case; it is holding steady. The reason: The home loan rates they have increased." Below is a verbatim transcript of the interview. Also watch the accompanying video. Q: Take us through the financing of this project itself, we understand it is a Rs 500 crore project, so is this just all of the IPO money that will suffice, how would you finance it? A: The debt equity ratio is going to be 1:1 and as far as the debt part is concerned we will finally go to the banks. We have already started working with some of the banks and we hope to raise somewhere around Rs 160-170 crore in the process for that. Q: When do you start booking revenues, you were telling us in the break that you will start leasing out properties pretty quickly, so when does it start showing in the P&L form of revenues? A: As far as the revenues are concerned, they will start logging in only after we have built and only after the lease income starts coming in. So we will start the process of leasing in another few weeks. Right now, we are at the stage where we are closing out all the issues related with the architecture and design and there ofcourse then the next task would be to get all the leases and place particularly for the anchor investors and ofcourse the leasing continues, booking of the space continues to happen till the end of the construction phase. But we don