Lookback: How Bajaj Housing Finance's 2024 IPO became the year's most subscribed public offer

A 64x subscription, a Rs 1.36 lakh crore debut, and the slow Oct bleed that no anchor brochure warned about.

By the time the Bajaj Housing Finance subscription window shut on the evening of September 11, 2024, the National Stock Exchange tape was carrying a number that had not been seen in any 2024 mainboard issue before or since: 63.61 times. The Rs 6,560 crore offer, India's largest housing finance IPO at the time, had attracted bids worth roughly Rs 3.23 lakh crore across three days. Retail investors alone had placed bids of over Rs 10,000 crore on the opening session, prompting the registrar to redirect unfilled portions across categories within hours. For an issue that had been telegraphed for nearly a year as a forced regulatory listing under the RBI upper-layer NBFC framework, the velocity of demand surprised even the syndicate desks running the book.

Looking back from May 2026, the BHFL listing of September 16, 2024 sat at the centre of a very particular moment in the Indian primary market cycle. Anchor demand was at peak hubris, listing pops were being underwritten as a structural feature rather than a behavioural anomaly, and the secondary market was still ten trading sessions away from the late-September top that would mark the start of a six-month FII selling cycle. The BHFL chart, with hindsight, captured all three of those forces in a single arc.

The anchor book, and what it actually said

The anchor allocation, finalised on September 8, 2024, was Rs 1,758 crore across 104 funds at the upper end of the Rs 66 to Rs 70 price band. The composition of that book was the first signal worth reading carefully. Government of Singapore took the largest single slug. Norway's Government Pension Fund Global, Fidelity, Nomura, Morgan Stanley Investment Funds, Invesco Developing Markets, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, and a clutch of Blackrock vehicles populated the foreign side. The domestic side was equally crowded: SBI Mutual Fund, ICICI Prudential, HDFC MF, Nippon India, Aditya Birla Sun Life, Kotak, Axis, and the Life Insurance Corporation of India all secured allocations. LIC, in particular, was a tell. The state-owned insurer had been a measured participant in the 2024 IPO cycle, and its presence in the BHFL book signalled that the price band, despite the headline P/BV multiple of roughly 3.2 times post-money, was acceptable to the most price-disciplined balance-sheet allocator in the country.

Caption: The weekly tape, anchored on September 16, 2024, showed the listing-week candle as the all-time high and the subsequent thirteen weeks as a measured drawdown into the anchor lock-in expiry zone.

What the anchor book did not contain was almost as instructive. The pure long-short hedge funds that had dominated the anchor books of 2023 era SME and consumer tech IPOs were largely absent. The BHFL book was a long-only book, dominated by sovereign wealth, insurance, and large mutual fund flagships. That composition mattered for two reasons. First, it telegraphed a slow-money buyer who was unlikely to flip on day one, reducing the float that would actually trade in the first week. Second, it meant that the only meaningful supply event on the calendar was the 30-day anchor lock-in expiry on October 16, 2024, with the subsequent 90-day cliff in mid-December.

Subscription mechanics, day by day

The category-wise subscription pattern, when laid out across the three days of bidding, was a textbook study in how Indian primary market demand had restructured itself by 2024. On day one, September 9, the issue was already 0.94 times subscribed by the close, with retail leading at 1.6 times and QIB barely showing at 0.05 times. Day two, September 10, saw retail and HNI run the book to roughly seven times overall, with QIB still parked. The QIB book, as had become standard practice, opened on day three at 10 AM and was 222 times subscribed by 5 PM. NII (large) closed at 41 times. NII (small) at 56 times. Retail at 7.04 times. Employee at 1.93 times.

The 222 times QIB number was, on its own, the largest QIB bid-to-cover for any 2024 NSE mainboard listing of size above Rs 2,000 crore. The arithmetic behind it was telling. QIB shares on offer were roughly 6.3 crore. Bids received against that quota were roughly 1,400 crore shares, implying notional QIB demand of over Rs 98,000 crore at the upper band. Whether or not that demand was real (a chunk of it was clearly margin-funded ASBA application stacking from category-shifting bidders), the headline number reset expectations for what a "blockbuster" book looked like in the second half of 2024.

The grey market premium, tracked through the bidding window across Mumbai's unofficial dealers, moved from a Rs 55 premium on the morning of September 9 to Rs 90 by the evening of September 11. At the upper band of Rs 70, that premium implied a listing print near Rs 160, or roughly 128 percent above issue. The actual listing came in slightly below that, but the direction of travel was correctly priced by the GMP grid.

Listing day, and the one-day window that mattered most

On the morning of September 16, 2024, BHFL listed on the NSE at Rs 150 against an issue price of Rs 70, a 114.29 percent premium. The BSE print was Rs 150 as well. The first trade carried Rs 5,750 crore of notional volume in the opening cross. The intraday high of Rs 165 was printed inside the first ninety minutes. The close, at Rs 164.99 on the NSE, was up 135.7 percent. The market capitalisation on listing day close was Rs 1.37 lakh crore, which made BHFL the seventh largest listed NBFC in India by market value within hours of its debut.

Caption: The daily tape from September 16 to October 16, 2024 traced the classic Indian listing arc: a vertical first session, a five-session consolidation in the Rs 155 to Rs 175 band, and then a controlled descent into anchor lock-in expiry.

The day-one tape was, in its own right, a piece of market microstructure worth dissecting. Pre-open quoted Rs 150 against an indicative band of Rs 70 plus or minus 20 percent, which exchange systems should have rejected. The NSE invoked its discretionary listing-day band rule, opened the stock at the indicative print, and let the auction find its own level. By 10 AM, the order book showed a textbook listing-day pattern: heavy institutional buying in 5,000 to 10,000 share lots concentrated between Rs 152 and Rs 158, retail selling in 200 to 500 share lots scattered across the Rs 162 to Rs 168 band, and a thin offer stack above Rs 168 that allowed the print to drift to Rs 165 on relatively modest volume. Anchor investors, locked in until October 16, were spectators.

The day-one volume, at roughly 47 crore shares across NSE and BSE, equated to nearly half of the entire 67.5 crore-share issue size changing hands in a single session. That was the retail and HNI book exiting. The QIB book, almost by definition, held.

The thirty days that followed

Between September 17 and October 16, 2024, BHFL traced a slow, controlled decline. The stock closed October 16, the day before anchor lock-in expiry, at roughly Rs 130, which was about 21 percent below the listing-day close but still 86 percent above the issue price. The Nifty 50 over the same window fell from roughly 25,400 to 24,750, a decline of about 2.6 percent. BHFL, therefore, underperformed the index by roughly 18 percentage points in the first month of trading, which was the standard pattern for high-pop listings of that vintage.

The 30-minute intraday tape across that month told the cleaner story of who was buying and who was selling. The pattern of late-afternoon selling pressure (between 2:30 PM and 3:25 PM) was visible on at least fourteen of the twenty-two trading sessions in the window. Morning buyers, typically retail and momentum traders attracted by the listing-day fame, ran the stock up by 1 to 2 percent in the first hour. Institutional sellers, including the HNI book that had got allocation through ASBA stacking, methodically distributed into that strength through the day.

Caption: The 30-minute tape showed the recurring intraday signature of post-listing distribution: morning bid by retail, afternoon offer by HNI and short-term institutional float, with closing prints consistently in the lower half of the daily range.

Brokerage initiation reports inside the 30-day window were, on the whole, cautious. Most coverage initiated with a 12-month target in the Rs 140 to Rs 170 range, which, against a listing-day close of Rs 165, implied either flat or modestly negative returns over the medium term. The reports almost uniformly cited two concerns: a price-to-book of 5.2 times on listing-day close was rich versus the housing finance peer set, and the parent-driven distribution moat, while real, was already in the price. Bajaj Finance, the listed sister entity, was trading at a price-to-book of roughly 5.8 times in the same window, which the bulls used as comparison and the bears flagged as the wrong peer to anchor against.

Peer comparison, and what the cycle actually rewarded

Against the housing finance peer set in the same window (PNB Housing, Aavas, Aptus Value, Can Fin, Repco, LIC Housing), BHFL on listing day was trading at roughly twice the multiple of the best capitalised peer and roughly three times the multiple of the cheapest. None of those peers carried the Bajaj distribution arm, the captive auto-finance cross-sell, or the technology stack, so the premium was defensible on growth-rate arithmetic. But the 30-day return comparison was unflattering. LIC Housing was roughly flat over the same window. PNB Housing was up 3 percent. BHFL was down 21 percent from its listing close. The pop, as is almost always the case in Indian IPOs of this size and visibility, was the entire return for anyone who applied and flipped.

Versus the 2024 large IPO cohort, BHFL ranked first by subscription multiple, third by listing-day pop (behind Premier Energies and Bharti Hexacom), and roughly middle-of-the-pack by 30-day return. That positioning, in retrospect, was the textbook outcome for an issue where the anchor book was long-only, the listing was capped by exchange band rules, and the broader index was rolling over.

What the trade actually was

The honest read on the BHFL IPO, with eighteen months of price discovery behind us, was that the alpha lived entirely in the allotment, not in the holding period. An applicant who received the minimum retail allotment of 214 shares at Rs 70 (Rs 14,980 invested) and sold at the listing-day close of Rs 164.99 walked away with Rs 35,308, a gain of Rs 20,328 on a single-day cycle, which was 135 percent of capital deployed for one trading session of risk. An applicant who held that allotment through the lock-in expiry on October 16 was still up roughly 86 percent. An applicant who held through end-December 2024 was up roughly 60 percent. An applicant who held into the FII selling cycle of January-March 2025 saw the gain compress further, to roughly 35 to 40 percent.

The trade, in other words, was the flip. The post-listing discipline question, "do I sell into strength or hold for the franchise," resolved, for the median allotment holder, in favour of selling. The QIB anchors who held through the 30-day lock-in and beyond did so for franchise reasons that did not show up in 30-day returns.

VERDICT

Stance: NEUTRAL (retrospective) Horizon: 30 days post-listing (closed) Rationale: The BHFL IPO of September 2024 was a textbook flip-the-allotment trade, not a buy-the-listing trade. The anchor book quality validated the franchise; the subscription multiple validated the marketing; the listing pop captured the entire 30-day return. Holders past lock-in expiry on October 16, 2024 underperformed the Nifty by 18 percentage points in the first month. The trade was the application, the trade was the flip, and any narrative that claimed otherwise was sold by someone who never got allotment.