Ingenia Communities raises $61.7m to fund purchases RETIREMENT village owner Ingenia Communities has raised $61.7 million to fund its acquisition of another eight manufactured home estates. The total consideration for the portfolio is $82m, although contracts have only been exchanged on one village, the Drifters Holiday Village at Kingscliff on the north coast of NSW. Ingenia is in due diligence on the other seven properties and will formerly announce its purchase of those estates when the deals are finalised. The offer price of $0.365 per security is a 12 per cent discount to the last traded price of $0.415 yesterday. The offer was underwritten by Petra Capital and RBS Morgans. "The demand has been overwhelmingly strong so the book has been closed early," chief executive Simon Owen said. He said the acquisition underscored the company's desire to focus purely on manufactured home estates (MHEs). "We spent two years researching this market before we made our first acquisition," Mr Owen said. He said Ingenia had been constrained by finding capital rather than finding accretive acquisitions. Mr Owen said the MHE model produced a much more even cash flow for Ingenia from the rents paid by park tenants than retirement villages using the deferred management fee model. Ingenia is looking to sell DMF villages. The suite of eight villages Ingenia is looking to buy are all located in regional NSW close to major employment centres or in Sydney. The group is expected to buy more estates in the future but will now focus on expanding the number of homes available for sale and rent at its existing parks, with a target to produce 240 new dwellings a year by the end of fiscal 2015. "We want to build a dominant footprint in the NSW market before we look to expanding into Queensland and Western Australia," Mr Owen said.