DLF posts first ever quarterly loss, misses estimates

MUMBAI (Reuters) - DLF, India's largest real estate developer, posted its first ever quarterly net loss of 41.9 million rupees for the January-March quarter, weighed down by slowing home sales in a sluggish economy.

Losses of 770 million rupees in its insurance and hotel subsidiaries contributed to the overall quarterly loss, the company said in a statement late on Thursday.

DLF, which builds homes, offices and shopping malls, has lost about 61 percent of its value since listing on the stock exchange in 2007, underperforming the wider market <.BSESN> which is up 36 percent over the same period.

DLF was valued by the market at $6.5 billion as of Thursday's close.

The sale of homes in the area around capital city New Delhi, DLF's main market, fell 18 percent in the quarter ended March, the steepest regional drop in the country, according to Mumbai-based property data analysis firm Liases Foras.

DLF had reported a net profit of 2.12 billion rupees in the year ago quarter. Revenues for the fiscal fourth quarter were down 15 percent at 22.3 billion rupees from a year earlier.

Analysts on average expected the company to post net profit of 1.9 billion rupees on revenues of 19.8 billion rupees, according to Thomson Reuters Starmine. (Reporting by Aditi Shah; Additional reporting Abhishek Vishnoi; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)