Blackstone Group buys One BKC building in Mumbai

In the year's largest commercial real estate deal so far, US-based private equity firm Blackstone Group Lp has acquired a marquee office building in Mumbai's Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC) for approximately $357 million (Rs 2,500 crore). Owned and developed by Mumbai-based real estate firm Radius Developers, the eight-storey building, One BKC, is spread across 700,000 sq ft and is fully leased out. Some of the big tenants include Bank of America, Facebook, Merril Lynch, Cisco and Amazon. Blackstone is also working on buying out Adani Realty's 800,000 sq ft commercial project, Inspire, for around $271 million (Rs 1,900 crore) in the same area. The Blackstone-One BKC deal will lead to Indiabulls Housing Finance exiting the project. Blackstone has been on an aggressive buying spree in India to build a large portfolio of marque commercial real estate. So far, it has invested $5.4 billion across 33 investments in India's real estate sector. Of this, $4 billion has been invested in office assets alone.