At a Glance – Mall Raja with a Calculator
Nexus Select Trust, India’s first listed consumption-center REIT, is basically the landlord of your weekend plans. Movie tickets, food courts, impulse shopping, hotel stays, and a bit of office rent on the side — all neatly wrapped inside 10.6 million square feet of retail muscle spread across 15 cities.
As of today, the unit trades around ₹158, giving it a market cap of ~₹23,963 Cr, a P/B of 1.74, and a dividend yield of ~2.8%. Occupancy? A smug 96.9%. Tenant sales? ₹1,742 per sq ft, up nicely from FY24. Distribution for Q2 FY26 came in at ₹2.198 per unit, backed by ₹3,330 Cr of total payout — yes, real cash, not PowerPoint EBITDA.
Debt stands at ₹58 bn, cost of debt ~7.5%, and management is clearly juggling fixed vs floating rates like a seasoned street performer. Retail contributes over 90% of revenue, hotels and offices are side hustles, and renewables are the “ESG brownie points” bucket.
In short: this is not a growth story screaming from rooftops. This is a steady, rent-collecting, chai-sipping landlord that likes predictability more than drama. But is the valuation behaving? Keep reading.
Introduction – India Shops, Nexus Collects
Let’s get one thing clear early: Nexus Select Trust is not a real estate developer. There’s no “booking open”, no launch ads, no ribbon-cutting selfies every quarter. This is a post-construction, rent-harvesting machine.
Registered as an irrevocable trust under the Indian Trust Act and regulated by SEBI’s REIT framework, Nexus is sponsored by Wynford Investments, a Blackstone affiliate — which already tells you the tone of the business: boring, institutional, and obsessed with cash flows.
Since listing in May 2023, Nexus has built a portfolio of 19 Grade-A urban consumption centers, with ~3,000 stores and over 1,000 brands. These are not random malls
in the middle of nowhere. These are city-centric assets where footfalls translate directly into tenant sales, and tenant sales translate into rent escalations.
What’s interesting is the discipline. Occupancy has been ~97% for 10 consecutive quarters. Re-leasing spreads crossed 20%+ on renewals in Q2 FY26. NAV has inched up to ₹159. And distributions keep flowing every quarter like clockwork.
But here’s the catch — the unit price already knows this. At ~47x earnings and ~1.7x book, the market isn’t treating Nexus like a sleepy bond proxy. So the real question becomes:
👉 Is Nexus a defensive income vehicle… or an overpaid mall landlord?
Business Model – WTF Do They Even Do?
Imagine you own the landlord rights to India’s shopping addiction.
Nexus doesn’t sell shirts, popcorn, or hotel rooms. It sells space — and charges rent based on how well tenants sell their stuff.
Core Engines:
- Retail Consumption Centers (90.7% revenue)
10.6 msf of leasable area, ~3,000 stores, occupancy ~97%. Anchor brands pull footfalls, inline stores pay premium rents. - Offices (5.6% revenue)
1.3 msf of office space, occupancy at 88%, WALE of 3.1 years. Not glamorous, but stable. - Hotels (3.5% revenue)
3 hotels, 450 keys, occupancy ~70%, ADR ~₹8,672. Cyclical, but complementary. - Renewables (0.2% revenue)
60+ MW
