iranian clothing stores are seen at kourosh mall in western tehran iran june 22 2019 picture taken june 22 2019attention editors this picture was provided by a third party mumbai bangalore despite the onslaught of the ecommerce business across the country malls are still serious business as indicated by the number of development planned and proposed by realty developers the sector is riding high on the phenomenal rise of consumerism and renewed interest by institutional investorsindia is set to get over 65 million sq ft of new mall spaces by the end of 2022 of this total new supply the top 7 cities comprise 72 share and the remaining 28 or 182 million sq ft is slated to come up in tier 2 and 3 cities said anarock property consultants report advt this new supply is also driven by the increasing interest of institutional investors including private equity players who invested almost 19 billion into indian retail between 2015 and q1 2019 in fact over 60 of this investment corpus was infused in the last two years of 2017 and 2018 alone making these the best years for the retail sector in recent times anuj kejriwal md ceo anarock retailaccording to him notwithstanding the decline in deal activity in the second half of 2018 following the non banking finance companies induced liquidity crisis the retail segment attracted investments of almost 115 million in just the first quarter of 2019in one of indias biggest transactions to help build a property investment platform private equity major warburg pincus last month entered into a 1billion alliance with mumbaibased developer runwal group to fund retailled mixeduse projects across the country this joint venture is planning to develop highquality shopping malls across tier 1 2 and 3 cities in indiathere is certainly a need for highquality retail space and that leaves a lot of potential for institutional investments both from the retailer and consumer side there is strong need for retail and social space and that is what has created the opportunity for the platform runwal and warburg have formed said sanjay dube ceo virgo retail venture a warburgrunwal alliance advt since 2015 indian real estate has witnessed 25 platforms getting created aggregating to 88 billion by global investors like warburg pincus goldman sachs cppib allianz ascendas xander cdpq apg etc the key purpose of these platforms creation was to create a pool that can be invested if the investment criteria are met without spending long time before each investmentmajorly these deals are sector focused and were created with an aim to build long term partnership with the other partner mostly a local developer with good market understanding and established execution track recordapart from platformlevel deals the retail sector will witness new trends and methods of fundraising including retail real estate investment trusts reitsaccording to kejriwal reits can be a viable tool for mall developers to raise funds but this fundraising instrument still needs to mature sufficiently also the