Zell gets even gloomier, hammers ZIRP, starts selling. ‘No one has ever accused me of not being a realist,’ Sam Zell told CNBC. The chairman of Equity Group Investments and of apartment mega-landlord Equity Residential was talking about the markets for office and apartment buildings in some major cities that have already peaked.
‘Overall we’ve come off this extraordinary period of liquidity and this extraordinary period of low interest rates,’ he said. ‘I think we’re unlikely to see a repeat of that going forward, and I think we’re going to see more supply in what had been pretty tight markets.’
And he has been selling. Back in 2007, he once again proved his sense of market timing. As the commercial property bubble was already teetering, he sold Equity Office Properties Trust to Blackstone for $23 billion, not including $16 billion in debt. Then prices crashed, and commercial property defaults hit the banks. As the dust was settling at the end of the Great Recession, he went on a shopping spree.
This post was published at Wolf Street on May 27, 2016.
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