Burmans pick up 20% in Cerestra

Mumbai: Gaurav Burman of Burman Family Holdings, the investment arm of the controlling shareholders at consumer goods maker

Dabur

, has picked up a 20% stake in

Cerestra

Advisors, a real estate private equity investor focused on education infrastructure and industrial parks.

Burmans

will be the anchor Indian investor in Cerestra, in which in the London-based

The Capital Partnership

(

TCP

), an independent asset manager of the uber rich, is the largest shareholder with a direct 49% stake. Cerestra is building a real estate portfolio of K12 schools, biotech, life sciences and apparel parks through acquisitions. It plans to list these “socially relevant and business cricitical” real estate assets as specialized real estate investment trusts (

REITs

) on the Indian or overseas bourses.

Ceresta founders—Jasmeet Chhabra, a former managing director of Red Fort Capital and Vishal Goel, ex-India head of NYSE-listed Alexandria REIT—together control the remaining 31% shareholding. Cerestra already owns a portfolio worth $125 million through nine schools and a knowledge park, through two verticals Cerestra Edu-Infra Fund and industrial parks branded as Mission Neutral.

“We will benefit from the strong Indian anchoring and professional working environment the Burman family brings to the table just as TCP helps us with a robust global outreach,” Cerestra Advisors Managing Partner Jasmeet Chhabria told TOI. With about $8 billion in assets, TCP mostly manages the wealth of the Middle East billionaires, who like their global peers are investing in rent-yielding real estate assets in high growth economies such as India.

Cerestra Edu-Infra, which is raising $400 million offshore and domestic funds, has acquired some schools assets of Witty International, Jain Group of Institutions and GEMS Education in Gurgaon, Bangalore and Jaipur. For industrial parks, Cerestra has a joint venture with Singapore-based hedge fund Lighthouse Canton, which recently acquired Alexandria Knowledge Park at Genome Valley in Hyderabad.

The Sebi has notified REIT guidelines galvanizing global investors like Blackstone Group, GIC of Singapore and Canada’s Brookfield, which have bet big money on acquiring the country’s large tenanted, income-earning real estate that provide stable returns. “But that leaves out asset owners who don’t the necessary scale, but have quality assets that can be part of an independent REIT. With partners like TCP and Burmans, Cerestra could be a partner of choice for asset owners and capital allocators alike,” Chhabra said.


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