ICICI Venture to float $2 bn real estate fund

The fund from the country’s largest private equity fund (it manages assets of over $2.5 billion in a diversified portfolio) comes just 18 months after it launched a real estate fund of $500 million. Of this, it has already invested 70 per cent in various projects.

The private equity fund is planning to operate in the entire value chain of the real estate business and will now use part of the cash from the fund to build a land bank. It has also decided to buy and manage completed properties — commercial and residential — and sell them later

ICICI Venture joins other majors such as Morgan Stanely, Citigroup, HDFC, J P Morgan, and Kishore Biyani that hope to cash in on the realty boom by floating real estate funds.