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RMZ Corp. To Sell Assets Worth $2 Billion To Brookfield

With this deal, the Bengaluru-based developer seeks to pare debt.

Window cleaners stand in a cradle as they wash office windows of a building. (Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg)
Window cleaners stand in a cradle as they wash office windows of a building. (Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg)

RMZ Corp. has announced the sale of a portion of its real estate assets to Brookfield Asset Management Inc. for $2 billion as it seeks to pare debt.

RMZ would sell as much as 12.5 million square feet out of its total portfolio of 67 million sqft. The deal includes assets in Bengaluru and Chennai and divestment of the group’s co-working business, CoWrks.

Upon divestment, RMZ is now among the only zero-debt real estate companies globally, Manoj Menda, corporate chairman of RMZ Corp., was quoted as saying in a statement. “With this deal, we have ample headroom to achieve our next phase of growth that RMZ 2.0 has defined for us. Our massive transformative purpose is to disrupt the way people view work, defining the future of space.”

RMZ Corp. said in a statement that this is the largest deal in Indian realty. The company owns office buildings in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi-NCR, Pune and Mumbai, and counts Accenture, Google Inc., HSBC Holdings Plc., Dell, Honeywell International Inc., Morgan Stanley, Reliance Industries Ltd. and Cisco Systems Inc. among its tenants. Their portfolio, developed and under development, has assets worth $10 billion under their ownership and management.

“We confirm the development,” Brookfield Asset Management told BloombergQuint. “However, we shall not be offering any additional comments.”

Analysts said the timing of the deal was opportune. It’s a very apt time for RMZ Corp. to make this structured exit as commercial real estate is already going through a transition phase due to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, according to Pankaj Kapoor, founder and managing director of Liases Foras, a real estate consultancy. “It’s a well-timed deal to cash out before we actually start seeing the negative impact of Covid on the commercial real estate. We’re most likely to see many more such deals in the future provided there are takers.”