After raising a Rs 1500 crore for its real estate fund earlier this year, Blackstone backed ASK group has launched a new property fund of similar quantum, said a senior executive of the group .“We plan to raise Rs 1000 crore by March and would like to do a final close within 12 months,” said Sunil Rohokale, managing director and chief executive at ASK group.

He said they would do 8 to 10 investments and focus on top 5 cities like they did in previous funds. Each investment would have a ticket size of Rs 150 to Rs 200 crore, he said.ASK Property Investment Advisors (ASK PIA), the real estate focused fund manager of the group, has raised over Rs 6,100 crore so far and its key investors include family offices, utra high net worth individuals (UHNI), high net worth individuals (HNI) and institutions. It has done investments across 35 projects and 19 complete exits in the last 12 years.“We have been into real estate private equity for the last 15 years. This is the fastest deployment we have done. We raised Rs 1500 crore fund in April this year and committed Rs 900 crore worth of funds,” he saidBy March they will deploy 100 % of funds and draw down 90 % of the fund, he said.ASK Property Fund , managed by ASK PIA, invested Rs 225 crore in a project being developed by Pune’s Kumar Realty from the fund raised in April this year.Overall, PE investments in the real estate sector are estimated to touch $5.6 billion in 2023, a 5.3 per cent y-o-y growth, Amit Bhagat, CEO & MD, ASK Property Fund said in a release recently.Home grown property funds are increasingly raising credit funds as banks are lending only for selective purposes and lending by non bank lenders yet to pick up after the NBFC fund crunch started post the IL&FS crisis in 2018.Over Rs 6,000 crore of funds have been launched or raised by the likes of ASK, Motilal Oswal, Sundaram Alternates among others.