Ronald Lyon, the colourful property developer who acquired his first industrial estate near Walton in 1954, and whose last financial reincarnation was run from an office above a newsagents in Hampton Court, died from cancer on November 26. He was 76.

A survivor of many financial catastrophes, he was a completely self-made man whose proud boast was "I've never had a wage packet in my life".

Some of his business failures were as spectacular as his lavish lifestyle, which was legendary. For example, when breathalysers were introduced to Britain, he hired a fleet of 50 Rolls-Royces for guests at one of his huge parties in the Dorchester.

His major property business, Lyon Group, hit the headlines when it went bust in 1974. It had not been his first insolvency and he soon built a new property empire, only to see that too fail in 1983.

He was then a consultant to a house-building firm which went into liquidation in 1990. But before his death he had started again with Ravenbourne Securities, the Hampton Court firm he set up in 1998 with himself as chairman and his stepson Michel as managing director. Financed by Standard Life, Ravenbourne set about redeveloping the Thames Gateway area of east London.

Lyon Group, which started with his first investment in Walton, was at one time the country's largest developer of industrial buildings. Until its collapse in 1974 the group had let a new property every week since 1958.

His father was a small Essex housebuilder and, at 16, Ronnie started building garden sheds at the family home in Halstead. He sold them for £16 10s each.

With the proceeds from this and from his sideline installing loudspeakers at village dances and vicarage ftes he bought a Ford Model 8. Too young to have a licence, he hired an older youth to drive him. Though he later passed his driving test, he never dispensed with chauffeurs.

Bomb-damaged Britain needed factories to rebuild its industry and Mr Lyon was soon buying war-surplus buildings and leasing them to manufacturers.

He quickly applied industrial building methods to erecting factory buildings by developing a system of off-the-shelf steel-framed units that could be rapidly put together.

It irked him that while manufacturers received Government grants for capital expenditure, developers received no subsidy for building factories.

He therefore devised a scheme whereby he would nominally "sell" the land to the manufacturer, allow it to claim its grant, then repurchase the property for a reduced sum.

His first setback came in 1954, when Ronald Lyon & Co, which dealt in scrap metal, went into liquidation with a substantial deficit.

He was charged with fraudulent conversion but four years later, after a three-week trial at the Old Bailey, he was acquitted.

In 1954, he acquired his first trading estate, near Walton, which he made the headquarters of Ronald Lyon Estates, later to become Lyon Group, and moved to Lyon House, a windowless office tower in Wimbledon.

By the time the group finally collapsed it had once again moved, this time to Colliers Wood, and was employing more than 1,000 people.

At the height of the firms success he took boxes at Goodwood and held parties every day at Royal Ascot.

He bought a grand house at Sunningdale, near Ascot, where he had the swimming pool deepened and acquired 21 paintings by L S Lowry and an impressive collection of impressionist paintings, including Monet's Les Bords de la Seine Au Pont D'Argenteuil.

When jewellery was stolen from the house, he bought a three-year-old cheetah called Princess Roza, which his wife took on a lead to the shops until it lashed out and was dispatched to a zoo.

Money seemed to be no object for the increasingly burly developer, who constanly smoked large cigars and enhanced his fat-cat image with comments such as: "If I miss a plane to a meeting, I charter one."

His first wife died in 1982. He is survived by his second wife, his son, daughter and three stepchildren.