“We are not slowing down on any of our projects. Jaipur is rocking, Chennai is doing well, city-based projects such as Faridabad are also doing well,” Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd Executive Mr Arun Nanda said.

Fundamentals of real estate have not changed. Mr Nanda said, there were no funding issues for its projects and the company’s affordable housing projects are not going to disappear.

“We have actually got cash in the bank,” he said, adding there is a huge demand in Rs 30 to 40 lakh apartments segment. He, however, said the housing loan segment is facing problems and investors are not coming forward. “Demand has been put on back-burner and interest rates are hurting people,” he said.

Sun Group and Barwa have proposed to form a 50:50 joint venture company to be named as Sun-Barwa Land. The new company will seek approval from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) in India to aggregate, acquire, hold and develop land banks in high growth areas in the country. Sun Group and Barwa together will raise capital from Qatari and Middle Eastern investors.

Ghanim Bin Saad Al Saad, Barwa’s chairman and managing director said: “It was part of our strategy to enter the Indian market that has strong fundamentals and solid growth parameters. Barwa looks forward to its partnership with Sun Group due to its extensive experience in the Indian market.”

Nand Khemka, chairman of Sun Group said: “ We are proud to be partnering with Barwa which brings significant expertise from Qatar and the region to India with potential for major growth for years to come.”

These jewelry chains, mostly in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, have been catching the attention of depositors from smaller investors at interest rates that are 3-5% over bank fixed deposits.

While dozens of cash-hungry companies, especially real estate, have also been offering competitive rates for deposits, investors are cautious of putting money in many of them, as they lack confidence about the safety of these deposits. But these big jewelers, though unregulated, have been able to draw investors to them because of the higher trust in them.

“People perceive investments in deposits of jewelers as ‘safe’ because there is gold involved. Also, this business is all about ‘trust’. While manufacturing companies have defaulted in the past, you would not hear of any defaults from a jeweler,” said a manager at a Kochi-based jewelry chain, which accepts these deposits. There has been no dearth of demand for such deposits because of the amount of unaccounted money present in the system, partly driven by the real estate boom across the country.

Every week, leading mortgage lenders and estate agents publish figures of declining prices, higher number of houses on the market, fewer buyers and smaller numbers of new mortgages being advanced.

Except in several areas of London, property prices all over Britain have recorded at least a 2% drop in the last year due to the credit crunch.

The slowing of Britain’s property market has led to several individual and institutional investors looking to India and other international hotspots.

India is also seen as an attractive destination due to the Indian government’s recent decision to relax rules for foreign investment in the housing sector.

Several India-specific investment funds have been set up, while British citizens of Indian-origin are increasingly investing in places such as Gujarat, Gurgaon, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Pune and Jaipur.

The investors here are also courted by Indian builders and property agents who organize exhibitions in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Leicester.

In Birmingham, a seminar was organized yesterday by Navyroof.com, a company that highlights investment opportunities in the most up-and-coming areas of India to the UK.

It offers potential investors advice on how they could benefit from investing in India’s thriving housing sector.

At the seminar, information was provided on the Indian economy and the sustainable factors driving its rapid growth. Also highlighted were the areas likely to give the greatest capital appreciation on investment.

Since India eased rules on inward investment in the construction industry in early 2005, foreign investors have earmarked an estimated $20 billion for the booming property market. But government figures show only about $2 billion has actually been spent in the last three years.

Funds used to complain that Indian developers slapped inflated price tags on themselves, their land, and projects.

But a fall in company valuations, and prospects of a drop in overheated land prices, has cheered private equity investors while making life tougher for developers.

Mr. Parry Singh, managing director of Red Fort Capital, which runs a $300 million fund that includes sovereign wealth fund money, said, “It’s brutal”.

Some foremost developers based in the region say it is becoming more and more complicated for them to sell flats at launch stage due to lack of interest from speculators. This reflects on the inherent demand structure in the real estate market.

Developers attribute this to stability in prices as against the past where prices were shooting up on a monthly basis. They add that the difficulty in booking flats may delay projects and reduce their pricing power, “A year ago, if we were selling over 100 flats in a month at launch stage, we now sell only 30-40 per month. Speculators, who would earlier frenetically book flats at the pre-launch stage only, have now disappeared,” said a senior executive of a real estate firm.

Till mid-2007, speculators made quick money by booking multiple flats at the launch of a project and exiting within a few weeks or months. But now, Omaxe executive director Vipin Aggarwal says, “The property prices have stabilised with little scope for speculators to make such big gains in the short term, leading to their retreat.”

Acacia Real Estate, a company spearheaded by Bahrain-based TAIB Bank, has acquired 49 per cent of Logix TechnoPark located at Noida in Uttar Pradesh.

Mr. Iqbal Mamdani, Acacia executive committee board member and TAIB Bank chief executive, said, “We are proud to be able to offer our clients this unique opportunity to invest in India’s real estate market”. Further he said that with a projected internal rate of return of over 24% per annum, the deal was structured to provide investors with downside protection and an average cash coupon of 8% per annum over a three-year holding period.

For a few minutes, that aim seemed to be within reach. The stock started trading at a robust 548 rupees ($13.86) and Reliance watchers sighed with relief. Then the bottom fell out. By the end of the day the stock was down 17%, taking the Sensex stock index down to its third-biggest recorded drop. The stock fell another 4.9% day before yesterday.

Reliance was not the first to run into IPO problems. Last week, Wockhardt Hospitals, a thriving medical firm, cancelled a $165-million (U.S.) IPO. It was followed by Emaar MGF, a real estate giant based in Dubai that planned a $1.8-billion listing, the second largest in the property field.

 The group housing plot has area 7160.90 sq meter and the minimum price will be 4000/- per square meter, whereas commercial plot has area 5319.91 square meters with the minimum selling price as 5000/- per square meter.