Billionaire Sam Zell, who built one of the largest real estate empires in the U.S. and made his hay by picking up distressed assets, died Thursday at 81 years old.
Sam Zell died Thursday.
Equity Residential, the real estate giant founded by Zell, announced his passing without listing a cause of death.
A pioneer in real estate investment trusts, Zell also famously orchestrated an $8.2 billion leveraged buyout of Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times parent Tribune in 2007.
Nicknamed the “grave dancer” for his knack at scooping up undervalued real estate properties, Zell oversaw the $39 billion sale of his Equity Office Properties Trust to BlackStone in 2007, shortly before the real estate market’s collapse.
Zell was worth $5.2 billion at the time of his death.
“The key to my success is that my focus is never on how good it's going to get. My focus is on the percentage that it doesn't work,” Zell told Forbes in 2013.
"I recognized a need common in all 13-year-old boys, saw a restriction on supply and I took advantage of it…Fifty-odd years later I'm still doing the same thing,” Zell once told Forbes about the impact his boyhood enterprise of selling Playboy magazines to friends had on his multibillion-dollar real estate empire.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated…
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