If you’ve ever shopped at a Nexus mall — whether that’s Nexus Seawoods in Navi Mumbai, Nexus Elante in Chandigarh, or any of their 17 properties across India — you’ve walked through a business that just made a big move in India’s financial markets. In February 2026, Nexus Select Trust, India’s only listed retail REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust), raised ₹700 crore through a sustainability-linked bond (SLB).

Nexus issued this bond to pay off an older, more expensive loan. This bond is unique because of the sustainability parameters embedded into the bond’s repayment conditions. The interest rate Nexus pays is tied to whether they meet two environmental targets:

1. They must make all 17 of their malls net-zero by 2030.
2. Every new mall they acquire in the future must get EDGE certification, a green building standard developed by the IFC (International Finance Corporation).

If they miss these targets, the interest they need to pay to the investors go up. Nexus needs to become more sustainable to save money. The targets have been independently reviewed and have been confirmed to be genuinely above-and-beyond, making this a new form of sustainability financing for the sector.

International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank Group has invested ₹250 crore of the ₹700 crore raised, making them the anchor investor. IFC’s participation signals that this deal is worth trusting. This is the first time IFC has directly invested in an Indian retail REIT. When an institution like IFC backs a bond, it tells the market: we’ve done the due diligence, the sustainability targets are real, and we believe this issuer can deliver. For a sector that has sometimes struggled to attract long-tenure institutional capital, this is a significant vote of confidence.

SLBs are not new to global real estate. In Europe and North America, large commercial real estate firms have been issuing these instruments for several years now, often tied to energy efficiency improvements, carbon reduction milestones, or green building certifications like LEED or BREEAM. What makes the Nexus bond stand out even in a global context is its structure. The bond has two tranches — ₹500 crore at a fixed 7% interest rate, and ₹200 crore at a floating rate benchmarked to something called the 3-month MIBOR OIS. Floating-rate real estate bonds are common in mature markets, but this is the first time any Indian REIT has done this. Paired with a 10-year maturity, the bond is ambitious and will be seen as a template that others could replicate.

Mindspace Business Parks REIT (an office-space REIT) issued India’s first REIT SLB in 2025, raising ₹550 crore, where IFC was again the anchor investor. Nexus has pushed the frontier further with a longer tenure, a floating-rate component, and in the retail space.

With this playbook, it will be interesting to see if other REITs follow suit with their own SLBs. There will be close attention paid by the market to whether Nexus actually hits its net-zero 2030 target. The credibility of the entire SLB market in India depends on issuers being held accountable when observation dates arrive.