When you’re a repeat player, when your world is your business and your business is your world, it’s all about long-term relationships. In any negotia… - Sam Zell

The opportunity was in the fact that maritime law, in the form of the Jones Act, prevents foreign-built or foreign-flagged ships from conducting coastal trade in the U.S. In the case of tourism, foreign vessels have to either drop off or pick up passengers from a non-U.S. port, certainly not convenient for interisland vacationing in Hawaii.

Up until then, our investment decisions had been based on buying broken companies on the cheap, below replacement cost, and building them from there.

I figured the deal was as good as done, and I returned to Ann Arbor and identified five houses that were all in the same price range for what I was going to pay for the land, about $32,000 to $34,000. These five houses were beautiful — every one of them was three times better than what Mrs. D lived in. One day I drove her around to see them. She walked through each one but never said a word. I couldn’t get any response at all. At the end of the day, I drove her back home. As we neared the corner by her house, we saw a man swaying and holding onto a lamppost. I pointed him out, and Mrs. D said, “Oh, that’s my brother. He lives with us and visits the bars every night. That’s why I don’t like any of the houses we went to see — because he can’t drive; he has to be within at least eight blocks of the downtown bars because he goes there every night, gets drunk, and then walks home.” That’s what we call the major unknown factor. “No problem,” I said to Mrs. D, for the first of many times.