Find the NOLs, add profitable business subsidiaries, and, ultimately, maximize the value of an asset we didn’t pay anything for in the first place. - Sam Zell

I was the pitchman. I went to each of the houses, sat on a lot of couches, and flipped through dozens of family photo albums as I explained to the homeowners that we were going to build student housing and they could either stay and put up with loud music at night and beer cans on the lawn, or they could move to the other side of Ann Arbor. It worked. I kept buying houses and eventually acquired one full block of land. They were all cash deals, $1,000 each to tie up the properties with deferred closings requiring around $20,000.

In real estate I’m known as the Grave Dancer. That was the title of an article I wrote back in 1976, and the nickname stuck. Some might see buying and creating value from others’ mistakes as a form of exploitation, but I see it as giving neglected or devalued assets, in any industry, new life.

Once again, I listened as people told me I was nuts. Emerging markets were largely considered untouchable by foreign investors at the time. They were still under the shadow of loan defaults from the 1980s, and Mexico’s recent Tequila Crisis (the devaluation of the peso) had triggered widespread currency devaluation across Latin America. To top it off, many emerging market countries were reeling from the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and Russia’s default in 1998. Emerging markets at the time were not for the faint of heart. For me, of course, that presented an environment with no competition for assets.