Before you apply for the DLF IPO, here are a few facts that you should know:

1. This is the biggest IPO ever to hit the Indian markets. Total IPO size is more than Rs 9000 crores. If 35% of the shares are reserved for the retail investors, it would mean more than Rs 3000 crore worth of shares. This is an amount equivalent to the market capitalization of many midcap companies on India. Chances of getting an allotment are very high for retails investors in this IPO. Even if DLF gets same retail response that Reliance Petroleum got, it would still be oversubscribed only about 4 times in the retail segment.

2. DLF has more than 50% of it's land bank in NCR -(National Capital Region i.e. Delhi and surrounding areas.). This makes the fortunes of the company heavily dependent on real estate prices in and around Delhi.

3. Many analysts are skeptical about the way real estate companies are valuing their land banks. There is no clarity and every analyst is coming out with a different figure about the valuations.

Many institutions believe that real estate prices may correct as much as 40% in many parts of the country. In fact. Citigroup, one of the lead managers of the DLF IPO stated that ""India's real estate market is in pain . The consensus view is almost unanimous that property prices are set to fall. It's pretty tough for the country's property developers,"

4. If an IPO application is done with part-payment, and investors get more than 27% of their application amount, they won't be able to sell these shares in the open market at the time of listing .

This is because these shares will not be fully paid up and only fully paid up shares can be traded on the stock exchanges.

5. The gray market premium for the stock is only Rs 40 currently . If the IPO doesn't get a good response, the premium will go down further.

and the most important point:

6. A few years back, DLF was accused by retail investors of outright fraud.

Please read the article by Sucheta Dalal about how DLF never sent rights issue offer letters to its retail investors and cheated them of crores of rupees.