DLF: India housing picking, no full recovery yet

By Devidutta Tripathy and Ami Shah

MUMBAI (Reuters) - DLF Ltd, India's largest-listed real estate firm, is seeing a demand revival in the housing segment but a full-fledged recovery was still some time away, a senior official said on Tuesday.

Group executive director Rajeev Talwar said debt reduction was still high on the agenda, but there were no plans for further capital raisings before the fiscal year ends in March. The developer's founding family raised $780 million by selling shares to institutions in May.

DLF has been hit by a crash in India's once-soaring property market. Prices fell by as much as 50 percent during the global financial meltdown, and are estimated to have recovered about 20 percent from their lows.

"You are now hitting an upside cycle, but you are not really at the crest itself," he said at the Reuters India Investment Summit.

In property, he expected housing would be the first to see demand recover, followed by commercial real estate and then the retail segment.

"If the economy is firmly in the saddle and running, in early 2010/11 you will see a huge revival in commercial real estate and little later year in retail. Maybe in the third quarter of the next financial year, you will see a huge revival in retail."

DLF has put its wind energy business on the block as part of a move to exit non-core assets, and had "renewed interest" from 3-4 parties but was yet to finalise a buyer, Talwar said, adding a sale would fetch about $200 million.

DLF has said it aimed to raise 100 billion rupees ($2.2 billion) over three years by selling non-core assets.