Britain's top property barons

Britain's property tycoons have never had it so good. The Estates Gazette Rich List, published for the first time tomorrow, chronicles the top 200 property fortunes and shows just how important the sector is to the British economy.

With seven in the top 10 on the list being London-based, it is also boom time for the capital's property barons in both commercial and residential property. The 200 individuals are worth a total of £35 billion, an average of £175 million each.

At the head of the list is the Duke of Westminster, who with an estimated £5 billion fortune is easily Britain's richest man. The Duke and his family own huge swathes of Mayfair and Belgravia and have property holdings all over Britain, the United States, Europe and the Far East.

In background at least, Sir Alan Sugar is about as far removed from the Duke as it is possible to be. But the roughhewn Londoner and former owner of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club has been building a second fortune away from his Amstrad electronics company. Sugar has invested tens of millions of pounds in property, mainly in London. Last year he sold a Mayfair flat that he had developed for £7 million.

One of the youngest entries is 37-yearold Andreas Panayiotou, who is worth £317 million but has never before appeared on a rich list. A former champion amateur boxer, he is the son of Cypriots who arrived in Britain in

1957. Panayiotou took over the running of the family business, Ability Developments, in 1996 and - ignoring the maxim that property is about "location, location, location" - started building in the then unfashionable areas of Hackney and Shoreditch. His developments have names like Ability Towers and Ability Plaza.

"If you go into an area and your developments are big enough, and you are doing enough of them, then you can change the area and upgrade it yourself," he says. Panayiotou has spent more than £120 million buying up London property in the past 12 months, and his portfolio now totals more than a million square feet.

The Honourable Mrs Mary Czernin is the only woman on the list. Her inclusion should not be surprising given her control of the Howard de Walden Estate with about 100 acres of Marylebone including Harley Steet, Wimpole Street and Cavendish Square.

Czernin, 68, is the eldest of four daughters of the late colourful Tory peer, the ninth baron Howard de Walden, whose family inherited the land from the Dukes of Portland in 1879.

These may be boom times for property, but you would never guess it by examining the bombed-out sector on the Stock Exchange - the City has consistently bought and sold the quoted property companies at a discount. Elliot Bernerd at Chelsfield has complained loud and long that it fails to understand the sector and the long-term nature of the investments, and in response has decided to take Chelsfield private.There is an ongoing punch-up at British Land, which, although a public company, is run more like a family fiefdom under the stewardship of John Ritblat.