Six months ago, Sam Zell was buying distressed assets as the U.S. oil sector was seeing a slowdown. He’s bought assets in California, Colorado and Texas from companies that are raising cash to stabilize their shrinking cash reserves. So why was Sam buying when others were running out of the building…Same compared the state of the oil industry in the US to the real estate industry in the early 1990s, where there were empty buildings all over the place and nobody had cash.
Same Zell's fame and $5 billion net worth ultimately originate from his ability to connect the dots in the real estate world, but more importantly his dedication to turning around troubled and distressed properties.
Sam Zell, who received his bachelor's and law degrees from the University of Michigan, began to buy distressed properties, fix them up, and rent them to students.
In 1969, Zell and his partner Robert Lurie formed Equity Properties Management Corp. to centralize Zell's rapidly diversifying investments in real estate. In the mid-1980s, U.S. real estate crashed, and Zell swooped in to acquire office and residential properties at fire-sale prices.
Sam Zell, the billionaire known for buying up troubled real estate, said the coronavirus pandemic will leave the same kind of impact on the economy and society as the Great Depression 80 years ago, with long-lasting changes in human behavior that imperil many business models.
“Too many people are anticipating a kind of V-like recovery,” Zell said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We’re all going to be permanently scarred by having lived through this.”
Just as the depression left behind a generation that couldn’t shake the experience of mass unemployment, hunger and desperation, the burdens this crisis has forced on society may be similarly hard to forget. Zell, 78, said it won’t be easy for people to live as they did before the “extraordinary shock” of the pandemic.
He expects some amount of social distancing and working from home to persist long after the acute phase of the outbreak is over, possibly for years. Retail, hospitality, travel, live entertainment and professional sports are some of the industries he sees continuing to struggle.
Like the economy and certain sectors, people infected with COVID-19 and needed ventilator assistance, but recovered may be suffer from long term damage as well. People that went into ICU are more likely to have lung damage and to develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a severe lung condition in which fluid collects in the lungs' air sacs. Based on SARS and MERS, some patients may develop lung fibrosis. Other conditions these people may face are mental health issues like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression.
So far just in the US, the virus has infected more than 1 million people and killing close to 70,000. A colleague at work many, many weeks ago said that at some point, we will know at least one person who has been infected or died from COVID-19. His thought provoking words are at least becoming a reality in my world.
This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn't financial advice. Do your own research before making investment decisions.