Construction at the projects, bankrolled under the Special Window for Completion of Construction of Affordable and Mid-Income Housing Projects (SWAMIH I), has witnessed a major pick-up and seven phases of other projects across the country are expected to be delivered in the second half of this year. In all, more than 3,000 stuck homes would be delivered through this scheme.
MUMBAI: A targeted federal financing pipeline to complete stuck housing projects is helping India’s middle- and low-income homebuyers, with two large last-mile initiatives already nearing completion since the special liquidity window was created late 2019.
Construction at the projects, bankrolled under the Special Window for Completion of Construction of Affordable and Mid-Income Housing Projects (SWAMIH I), has witnessed a major pick-up and seven phases of other projects across the country are expected to be delivered in the second half of this year. In all, more than 3,000 stuck homes would be delivered through this scheme.
“The fund team encourages the developer to start multiple points of work on the same site. The idea is to finish construction in the shortest pace of time unlike in the past when developers paced construction to match the sales velocity,” Irfan A. Kazi, Chief Investment Officer, SWAMIH Investment Fund I, told ET. “Due to work on multiple fronts, SWAMIH construction sites probably have the highest density of workers per site - about 5,000 at an aggregate level on all operating sites,”
SWAMIH is a category II Alternative Investment Fund (AIF) that was announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in September 2019 and was approved by the Cabinet in November 2019. It is currently the largest real estate private equity team in the country, having scaled up from a two-member team at the time of launch to 37 members now.
The Rs 12,500-crore fund, with a green-shoe option of an additional Rs 12,500 crore, aims to provide financing to enable completion of stalled housing projects and ensure delivery of apartments to troubled homebuyers.
Two big projects -- Mumbai’s CCI Rivali Park and Urban Land Amangani, Rewari-- will start offering possession to homebuyers by April itself.
Besides these, various phases of Mantri Serenity in Bengaluru, Lodha Splendora in Thane, TDI Lakegrove in Sonepat, Sikka Kimaya in Dehradun, SS Leaf in Gurgaon and Rajkamal Pride in Byculla, Mumbai, will be applying for occupation certificates in the second half of the year.
The fund has also been encouraging developers to aggressively complete construction and they also appreciate that sales will only pick up when the project is complete as most homebuyers are now looking for completed houses only.
According to Kazi, in the backdrop of increasing work pipeline and handling multiple developer engagements, the SWAMIH Fund’s investment team has also grown in size even while the rest of the industry was plagued by the news of downsizing.
SWAMIH fund has been encouraging developers to follow the Complete and Sell Homes (CASH) principle even while insisting that all payments for goods, services, sales and collections are done by online banking or cheque-based accounts.
According to government estimates, there are 4.58 lakh stalled housing units in 1,509 residential projects across the country.
The fund has cleared investments worth more than Rs 13,200 crore for 136 projects, and has started deploying funds across 36 projects. The last-mile funding being made available to these projects has instilled confidence among homebuyers.
The projects that have been approved for financial support are spread across a mix of markets including the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, National Capital Region, Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune and also tier-II locations including Nagpur, Jaipur and Nashik.
Source: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/property-/-cstruction/governments-last-mile-fund-swamih-readies-stressed-realty-projects-for-delivery/articleshow/80148073.cms
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