Sam Zell, billionaire real estate investor, dies
Sam Zell, a Chicago real estate magnate who earned a multibillion-dollar fortune and a reputation as “the grave dancer” for his ability to revive moribund properties died Thursday. He was 81.
Zell died at home from complications of a recent illness, according to Equity Group Investments, a company he founded in 1968. By the time he reached his 70s, he had amassed a fortune estimated at $3.8 billion.
Zell sold Equity Office, the office-tower company he spent three decades building, to Blackstone Group for $39 billion in 2007. It was the largest private equity transaction in history, and Zell personally netted $1 billion.
A month later, he made another deal that ultimately tarnished his image: the acquisition of the ailing Tribune Co. for $13 billion. The media giant filed for bankruptcy the following year.
Zell was born in Highland Park, Illinois, on Sept. 28, 1941, four months after his immigrant parents arrived in the United States. They fled Poland before the Nazi invasion.
His father was a wholesale jeweler who dabbled successfully in real estate investment and the stock market.
His first successes in real estate came while he was a student at the University of Michigan. After managing the building where he lived in exchange for free rent, he moved on to managing other properties, ultimately incorporating an apartment-management business and then selling it.
After working briefly at a Chicago law firm, he teamed with his Ann Arbor fraternity brother Robert Lurie and they began acquiring distressed properties from developers who were bogged down by high interest rates.
He later co-founded the Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business in 1999 with Lurie’s widow, Ann.
He maintained homes in Chicago and Southern California.
Zell is survived by his wife, Helen; his sister Julie Baskes and her husband, Roger Baskes; his sister Leah Zell; his three children, Kellie Zell and son-in-law Scott Peppet, Matthew Zell, and JoAnn Zell; and his nine grandchildren.