Premji Invest and Gaja Capital-backed housing finance company Weaver Services has received investor commitments of ₹1,500 crore and will start operations before the end of this month, founder Satrajit Bhattacharya said.
Weaver Services, which acquired Capital India Home Loans Ltd for ₹267 crore in October, is scouting for two more mortgage lenders, said Bhattacharya, who was earlier head of mergers and acquisitions at erstwhile HDFC Ltd. He declined to name the companies but said some of them were subsidiaries of listed companies.
“I have signed my shareholders’ agreement with Gaja Capital and Premji Invest. So, Premji Invest is the lead investor and Gaja is slightly smaller,” Bhattacharya said in an interview, adding the initial round is of ₹500 crore, which will be scaled up later.
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Weaver has received commitments totaling ₹1,500 crore from potential investors, which includes a large global technology-focussed fund, Bhattacharya said. He declined to name the investor since the agreement was yet to be signed. The acquisition of Capital India Home Loans would give the company a jumpstart since it will have a ready base of ₹500 crore in loans to start operations.
“It (Capital India Home Loans) is exactly the sort of loan book that we were looking for, with an average ticket size of around ₹12 Lakh, “He said.
Focus on affordable housing and tech
There has been quite a bit of interest in the affordable housing segment. The market for financing such housing in India is estimated at ₹13 trillion, with housing finance companies accounting for ₹6.9 trillion and banks ₹6.2 trillion, as per National Housing Bank data cited by a joint report by industry lobby body CII and real estate consultancy Knight Frank in December.
Bhattacharya said he plans to use technology to differentiate Weaver Services from the rest of the financiers. This would include how the lender uses analytics, machine learning, data science and artificial intelligence to assess customer creditworthiness and predict their repayment behaviour.
He said that the plan is to look at financing those with incomes around ₹35,000 per month. “We would not look at the very bottom of the pyramid because the team that we have put together does not have an understanding of that market,” he said.
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Weaver Services has hired former Fedbank Financial Services Ltd chief executive Anil Kothuri as its CEO. The company now has 300 employees though its acquisition of Capital India Home Loans and the other two potential acquisition targets have about 1,000 employees each.
That said, the lender is expected to find some stiff competition in the market since the affordable housing finance market has several large players as well. It includes the bigger players like PNB Housing Finance, whose affordable housing book stood at ₹5,744 crore.
Bhattacharya seemed unfazed by competition.
“What you are going to find is that effectively, they (competitors) play in the segment which is just below the prime segment and so, if the prime segment is at 8%, this will be at around 9.5-10%,” he said.
Weaver Services, he said, will charge an interest rate of 12-13% and will not look at the outskirts of metro cities like Mumbai to grow their book. Instead, the lender will look at tier-II to tier-IV locations where others are not so heavily present. Bhattacharya said the home financier will look at places like Baramati in Maharashtra.