Blackstone's Nucleus Office Parks targets 24.5 million sq ft by 2020 end

Blackstone’s Nucleus Office Parks targets 24.5 million sq ft by 2020 end

Blackstone Group is scaling up Nucleus Office Parks, an entity that houses commercial properties fully owned by the group, in a bid to own 24.5 mn sft of office parks by the year end, a senior official told ET. Half Blackstone Group’s portfolio is in Southern India.

“Nucleus will expand its capability in terms of development and stabilise the assets fully owned by Blackstone,” said Quaiser Parvez, CEO, Nucleus Office Parks.

Nucleus Office Parks currently has 9.6 mn sft of the operational and developmental portfolio across markets like Mumbai, Gurgaon and Chennai.

“The Southern commercial market including Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, will have around 50% of the office portfolio including developmental assets for Nucleus Office Parks,” said Parvez.

So far Blackstone has followed a partnership model with builders like Salarpuria-SATTVA, K Raheja, Panschil and Embassy Group to buy income yielding commercial assets.

Nucleus Office Parks will also see Blackstone Group merging some of the assets from the ongoing Prestige Estates office deal.

Recently, Blackstone finalised the terms with Prestige to acquire rental income assets, including mostly office space and a few malls and hotels, for about $1.5 billion.

Additionally, it has also added the recent Indiabulls portfolio to the entity to consolidate all its fully-owned properties under a single entity.

Currently, Nucleus Office Parks has properties like One International Center (formerly Indiabulls Finance Centre), One World Center (formerly One Indiabulls Centre) and One BKC-Radius in Mumbai.

It also owns commercial space in Chennai and Gurgaon.

Blackstone currently owns the largest office portfolio totalling 120 million sq. ft across 44 assets in six cities.

The market value of Blackstone’s investments in India stands at $50 billion.