Horner Homes: End-to-End Credit Analysis on a Complex Real Estate Deal

Sugin picked up the Horner Homes deal at a point where the project had an unusual structural feature: the landowner and the builder were two separate parties. Most real estate transactions Axis handled involved a single entity, and the credit team had real reservations about how the arrangement would hold up under scrutiny.

He started by traveling to Hyderabad to meet the clients directly. The site visit gave him a ground-level read on the project before any financial modeling began, and it shaped how he framed the risk in the credit appraisal memorandum that followed.

The credit appraisal memorandum covered the full stack: an executive summary, a techno-economic viability report commissioned from an external consultant, promoter background and integrity checks, company financials over three to four years, project profile including regulatory approvals and counterparty terms, and a financial model built around debt service coverage ratios.

He built a SWOT analysis that directly addressed the split-entity risk, laying out the pros and cons of the landowner-builder arrangement rather than glossing over it. The team had attempted to negotiate a merger of the two parties into a single entity, but that did not happen. Sugin's view was that the deal could still be approved if the risk was named clearly and the mitigants were credible.

The senior management committee reviewed the full credit appraisal and approved the deal. The complexity that had made the credit team hesitant became a documented and managed risk rather than a reason to walk away.