Samuel Zell, 66, is a self-made billionaire, whose investments are spread across many industry sectors but whose name has been closely associated with real estate since the 1960s.
Zell was born in Chicago in 1939, his parents having fled Poland on the eve of the Second World War. He attended the University of Michigan where, as an undergraduate studying law, he began investing in apartments and real estate in Ann Arbor and across southeast Michigan. He also struck up a defining friendship with fellow student Robert Lurie that turned into a formidable business partnership. The two men founded Equity Group Investment in 1968, with Zell in the forefront as the charismatic deal-maker. They invested in real estate and a wide variety of corporate enterprises.
Lurie died in 1990, leaving Zell to build the company further. In the recession and real estate downturn at the start of the 1990s, he snapped up distressed real estate assets and earned the nickname “the grave dancer” for deriving value from others’ distress. He was a master at finding finance for these investments from every source. Zell became a key driver of the quoted real estate investment trust sector, which grew rapidly from 1993 and he served for two years as the chairman of the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts between 1998 and 2000. He founded and was chairman of the largest Reit in the country, Equity Office Properties Trust.
In September 2006, the Forbes rich list estimated Zell’s personal net worth at $4.5 billion. This was before he had driven up the value of his Equity Office Properties Trust holdings through the sale to Blackstone.
Aside from real estate, Zell is chairman of several quoted companies, notably Anixter International, the world’s leading distributor of electrical and electronic wire and cable products. He says that today 75% of his investments are away from real estate.
Zell is renowned for his love of motorcycles and the group of business associates with which he tours has been nicknamed Zell’s angles. Each new year he distils his thoughts into a message, often accompanied by a song, posted for investors at www.yegsz.com. In 2005 it concerned the abundance of liquidity (Capital keeps falling on my head), in 2006 it concerned the danger to US capital markets of the excessive over-reach of Sarbanes-Oxley (with a re-working of Love and Marriage.)
