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The crash is coming but I'll still sell a house for [pounds sterling]85 million; (1) When the boat comes in: Andreas Panayiotou owns this 55-metre, [pounds sterling]27 million yacht (2) Road to riches: Andreas Panayiotou, from a rented flat in Mile End to a [pounds sterling]700 million fortune.

Article Excerpt
Byline: DAVID COHEN

ANDREAS Panayiotou smoothes his Gucci suit and coolly looks out over theWest End from his penthouse office in Portland Place. "This is where I do mythinking," he says, striding across the Italian-marble floor past his barstocked with Bollinger and onto the terrace where he lights up a cigarette.

"And what I think about the London property market might come as a shock tomany people." "The property frenzy is over," he declares. "All the big boys,including the banks, understand this. I expect residential property prices tofall by up to 30 per cent in the next two years, not just around the countrybut in London as well.

The problem is the buy-to-let market: the yields are so low that the maths nolonger makes sense. What I worry about is the man in the street who hasre-mortgaged his house to pile into buy-to-let and, unlike me, is geared to thehilt. I expect many, many repossessions..

It could be a bloodbath." Eleven years ago, few people would have listened towhat Panayiotou, then 30, had to say on the state of London's property market.He was a dyslexic East End lad, the son of Greek-Cypriot immigrants, who,having left school at 15 without a GCSE, had forsaken his dream to become aprofessional boxer to take over his...

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