Real Estate Visionary Sam Zell Has Died

Sam Zell, a man generally regarded as a genius within commercial real estate, has died today at his home due to complications from a recent illness, the family of Equity companies has announced. Zell, 81, was chairman of Equity Group Investments, Equity LifeStyle Properties, Equity Residential, and Equity Commonwealth. 

A self-made entrepreneur, over the course of his 60-plus-year career Zell launched and grew hundreds of companies that spanned numerous industries across the globe. But he was most widely recognized for his critical role in creating the modern REIT, which today is a more than $4 trillion industry.

Zell began his career by managing student housing apartments as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and his first employee was Bob Lurie, a fraternity brother. In 1968, Zell founded Equity Group Investments, a private investment firm headquartered in Chicago. A year later, Lurie joined him as a partner at EGI. Together, they built an empire, branching out from real estate to invest across industries in the 1970s and 1980s, with the partnership ending in 1990 when Lurie died of cancer – just before Zell launched what became some of the most successful REITs in history: Equity Residential, one of the largest apartment REITs,  Equity LifeStyle Properties, a manufactured home community and resort REIT, and Equity Office Properties Trust, which was the largest office building owner in the country and the first REIT in the S&P 500 when it was sold in 1997 for $39 billion in the largest leveraged buyout in history at that time.

In 2014, Zell took control of CommonWealth REIT, an internally managed and self-advised REIT  with commercial office properties in the U.S., renaming the company Equity Commonwealth and becoming chairman of the board. 

In a wide-ranging discussion with CBRE’s Spencer Levy that GlobeSt.com published in 2021, Zell told Levy that “I’ve never reached my goals and I’ve constantly moved the bar forward so that I get up every morning and there is a new hill to climb, a new thing to challenge. And that’s what turns me on.”

Zell also said that “more than anything else, my ambition was driven by my desire for freedom. Freedom meant that I didn’t have to wear a suit and freedom meant that I could ride a motorcycle. Freedom meant that I could do things that other people couldn’t do or wouldn’t do. To me, that’s been a critical part of my life. I think I’ve been very successful because one of the freedoms that I have achieved is freedom of conventional wisdom.” 

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. 

The son of Polish refugees Bernard and Rochelle Zielonka, Zell was born in Chicago four months after his parents’ arrival in the U.S. following their escape from Poland during the German invasion.