Development is near historic lows, but Sir George Iacobescu, one of London’s most successful developers, says it’s time to build.

“You need to have a little bit of guts,” Iacobescu, executive chairman of St John’s Wood Square, told more than 300 people at Bisnow’s 10th-anniversary London State of the Market event, where he sat for an exclusive onstage interview.

“The world around you is never going to be the right world. Trying to catch the cycle, it’s almost like trying to kiss a butterfly on the nose. It flies away from you.”

Iacobescu knows what it takes to build through a downturn. On 19 October 1987, the day of the Black Monday stock market crash, Olympia & York founder Paul Reichmann told Iacobescu and his colleagues to push ahead with Canary Wharf, a new financial district planned for an abandoned east London dockyard.

As chief executive and later chairman of Canary Wharf Group, Iacobescu became synonymous with a development that has weathered multiple cycles to become one of Europe’s largest business districts. It first drew major financial institutions from the City of London, then diversified into retail and residential.

Despite promising himself he would retire after leaving Canary Wharf Group in 2024, Iacobescu is practising what he preaches. He is overseeing a new 1M SF skyscraper in the City for U.S. insurer AmTrust Financial Services, advising J.P. Morgan on what could become Europe’s largest office building in Canary Wharf and leading a luxury residential development in a London market where sales have slumped over the past decade.

For Iacobescu, great developers see what others don’t. When Reichmann sent him to assess the prospects for Canary Wharf, he walked from his hotel in Grosvenor Square to the east London docklands. The outlook was bleak.

There was no train or tube line to the area, and the road layout made it difficult to reach by car. Iacobescu’s message to Reichmann was simple: Don’t touch it. But Reichmann was reassured by a promise from then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that the Jubilee line would be built. Olympia & York went on to invest more than £3.5B in Canary Wharf, delivering 4.5M SF of space before the company collapsed into administration in 1992. The Jubilee line still had not opened.

But Iacobescu said Olympia & York had the right model, one he still follows today: buildings that are architecturally simple on the outside, with large floor plates and sophisticated technology on the inside.

“Is the quality and what you're producing a product that the market would want?” he said. “Are you responding to something that the market wants, not just for the sake of developing?”

By giving major occupiers what they wanted, Canary Wharf attracted tenants like HSBC, Clifford Chance and Barclays. Some are now heading back to the City, Iacobescu noted, but others have stayed. HSBC is leaving 8 Canada Square, its headquarters since 2002, for a building near St Paul’s Cathedral about half the size when its lease expires next year.

Iacobescu is applying the same model across several projects since leaving Canary Wharf, putting the right building in the right place.

Iacobescu is overseeing plans to redevelop Exchequer Court, a 146K SF office building next to the Gherkin in the City. AmTrust Financial Services, one of its tenants, owns the property and occupies about 30K SF.

The project would replace the building with a 1M SF, 70-storey tower, putting it among the City’s tallest buildings alongside 22 Bishopsgate and the under-construction One London.

A planning application is expected early next year, with completion scheduled for 2033.

“If you look at the Square Mile, there is a serious shortage, but the shortage is not due to a lack of planning permissions,” Iacobescu said. “It's the cost of construction, it's the world economy, the exit yields, which none of us has any tool in fixing.”

Iacobescu expanded Canary Wharf into residential, with the company now owning nearly 2,500 rental apartments valued at around £1.5B.

But he stepped outside his comfort zone with St John’s Wood Square, a 120-home luxury development in the north-west London neighbourhood that launched last week. The project’s owner, Ananda Krishnan, who developed the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, brought Iacobescu in to lead the scheme. Krishnan died in 2024.

Iacobescu recruited several former Canary Wharf colleagues to work on the project but said luxury residential presented a very different challenge from building office skyscrapers.

“I compared Canary Wharf or a tower to building a Rolls-Royce, and it takes you about six months,” he said. “I compare the residential with the Patek Philippe watch, which takes you about two years to do.”

Despite a luxury residential market where sales volumes and values are down more than 25% from their 2015 peak, according to Knight Frank, the team refused to compromise on materials or quality.

“Again, if it's the wrong cycle, we create the cycle,” Iacobescu said, arguing that the development’s leafy St John’s Wood location would be a major draw for buyers. Prices start at £5.2M.

Iacobescu is also advising J.P. Morgan on plans for its new London headquarters, which could reach 3M SF, making it the largest office building in European history.

The bank has not yet given the project final approval, but Iacobescu said he has no doubt it will go ahead.

“I was enormously impressed by the care that J.P. Morgan is putting into the well-being of its staff, which is at the forefront of what they are doing,” he said. “It is a lesson for all of us.”

It may not be the last development Iacobescu works on, but after more than 40 years in London, his philosophy remains the same: Have a little bit of guts, and don't wait for the world to be perfect before you build.