LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Samuel Zell: Southeast Michigan
built 292 days ago
Samuel Zell is president, chairman, and founder of Equity Group Investments, LLC (formerly known as Equity Financial and Management Company). He maintains substantial interests in and serves as chairman of the board of various publicly traded companies, including Anixter International, a value-added provider of integrated networking and cabling solutions, and Equity Residential, the largest apartment real estate investment trust in the United States. Mr. Zell is ... chairman of Equity International, a privately held investor in real estate-related businesses outside the United States. He is a frequent contributor of articles to various publications and is often heard as a keynote speaker throughout the United States and Europe. Mr. Zell served a two-year term as chairman of the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts from 1998 to 2000. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the University of Michigan Law School.
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When Samuel Zell attended the University of Michigan in the 1960s, he and a partner made their first entrepreneurial decision to purchase an apartment building in Ann Arbor. Today he is "the largest landlord in the country" and ranks 112th on the 2005 Forbes Magazine list of the 400 richest Americans.
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After graduating high school in 1959, Zell went to college as a political science major at the University of Michigan, where he met his future long-term partner, Robert Lurie, the two men becoming fraternity brothers. As an undergraduate Zell began to manage some off-campus housing properties and was able to accumulate enough of a stake so that he and Lurie could enter the real estate business together. The two men were almost polar opposites in personality but ... complemented one another. Zell was the outspoken, often abrasive, visionary--the rainmaker--while Lurie was the retiring numbers man who minded the store. Both men continued to run their fledgling real estate business in Ann Arbor when they went on to law school at the University of Michigan. By the time they graduated in 1966, they owned a city block of student housing, all resulting from a $1,500 down payment.
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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 ... 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.
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A native Chicagoan, Mr. Zell is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the University of Michigan Law School. He began his career in real estate while an undergraduate at the University by managing apartment buildings throughout Southeast Michigan. Mr. Zell is an avid skier, racquetball player and enjoys riding motorcycles. He is a frequent contributor of articles to various publications and is often heard as keynote speaker throughout the United States and Europe.
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For Helen Zell, an honorary co-chair of U-M's $2.5 billion The Michigan Difference fund-raising campaign, the gift represents an ongoing commitment to promoting creative writing at Michigan. Her first gift funded the first-ever endowed professorship in the English Department-the Helen Herzog Zell Professorship-focusing on fiction. The first Helen Herzog Zell Professor was Nancy Reisman, whose latest novel, "The First Desire," has received the 2005 Samuel Goldberg Jewish Fiction Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. The award will be presented in New York in June.
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