With a personal fortune of £500 million, entrepreneur Yianis Christodoulou has shown how successful property management can take you all the way to the top of City & Guilds’ Vocational Rich List. Already the second largest freeholder at Canary Wharf with 2 million square feet of assets, Yianis recently added two hotels, one near Heathrow and the other in Manchester, to his property portfolio.
Yianis first hit the news in 2006 when he bought the Marriott Hotel in Canary Wharf for £110m; not bad for a young man who had to flee his homeland in Cyprus after the 1974 Turkish invasion to start a new life in Britain.
Leaving school at 16, he trained as a diamond mounter and, at 18, started his own business in Hatton Garden. He saved up to buy his first property, a North London studio flat, and by 1994 was investing and developing in the property market full-time.
