There isn’t much known about the man behind the rumored $262 million purchase of a 45-room mansion overlooking Hyde Park in London, other than he loves shattering real estate records.
In fact, there’s more public information about Cheung Chung Kiu’s real estate dealings than just about any other part of his life, according to Bloomberg.
He set a new price record in Hong Kong in 2015 when he purchased a property on the Peak for $656 million, and the supposed deal for 2-8a Rutland Gate wouldn’t be his first in London.
122 Leadenhall Street in London (Credit: Wikipedia)
His company CC Land Holdings Ltd. has focused on the U.K. since 2017 and has purchased $2.6 billion worth of towers in London since then. Among its holdings are the so-called “Cheesegrater” skyscraper and an office block in Central London. The firm also has a stake in a former mall near its chairman’s new manse.
Since 2014, CC Land has been slowly shifting its portfolio of long-term assets from Mainland China to Hong Kong and then to the U.K., which has earned him some criticism in China.
Cheung himself is said to be worth at least $1 billion. Along with his own company, he has stakes in at least 15 public companies and sits on three boards.
Cheung grew up in the city of Chongqing before moving to nearby Hong Kong after high school. He built an electronics business and started investing in real estate in the 1990s, according to Bloomberg.
He appears to like his privacy, saying at a 2018 conference in China that his group is “in a lot of investments in China” and that he also invests in his own name, “but you just would not know about it.” [Bloomberg]