Sam Zell — real estate mogul — is dead at 81

By Mark DeCambre

Sam Zell, a legendary real-estate investor who made billions scooping up distressed commercial properties, has died at 81, according to reports.

A message from Equity Residential (EQR), where he was founder and chairman, said that it was mourning the death of the prominent investor. "Mr. Zell was an iconic figure in real estate and throughout the corporate world [and] an active investor in real estate since the 1960s," the Equity Residential statement said.

Zell is credited with popularizing the real-estate investment trust and was known sometimes as a "grave dancer" due to his penchant for acquiring distressed real estate.

The Chicago-based investor bought dozens of foreclosed office buildings in the 1990s at steep discounts and eventually sold most of them through the $39 billion Equity Office Properties deal in 2007 to the private-equity firm Blackstone Group (BX), one of his more prominent deals, noted The Wall Street Journal in 2021.

Zell was the chairman of a number of real-estate companies, including Equity Residential, Equity LifeStyle Properties (ELS), Equity Commonwealth (EQC), Covanta Holding and Anixter International.

Equity Residential owns almost 80,000 apartments, and Equity LifeStyle is described as one of the U.S.'s largest investors in manufactured homes.

Zell, born in Chicago in 1941, founded the predecessor company to Equity Residential while a student at the University of Michigan and took it public in 1993.

The real-estate mogul started his career as a lawyer before moving into properties, where be built a net worth of $5.2 billion, according to Forbes.

He purchased the Chicago Tribune and affiliated daily newspapers in a 2007 leveraged buyout, and with them the Chicago Cubs baseball team. The publisher filed the following year for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and Zell left the company in 2010

Zell is survived by his wife Helen, three children and nine grandchildren, according to WSJ.

Key Words (March 2020):Billionaire Sam Zell says he's buying at 'ridiculously low' prices in one particular sector amid market volatility

-Mark DeCambre

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05-18-23 1403ET

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