Equity Office was the largest REIT in the country. We had spent a decade acquiring an irreplaceable collection of over five hundred of the best offic… - Sam Zell

In the early 2000s, new malls were sprouting up all over São Paulo and Rio, and industry ownership, as I’ve mentioned, was highly fragmented. We partnered with a local private equity firm to create BR Malls as a growth platform in 2006, investing $86 million. Roughly a year later, we led BR Malls in an IPO on Brazil’s Bovespa at an equity valuation of roughly R$2.1 billion. The capital enabled BR Malls to lead the industry in acquisitions. Five years later, the company had nearly fifty malls. Total returns for public shareholders were over 26 percent, and BR Malls had an equity market cap of R$10.7 billion. By the time we fully exited the investment in 2010, BR Malls was the largest mall company in Brazil, and we had achieved a 4.2x multiple, or 48.6 percent IRR.

A Jewish refugee delegation, including my father, went to the Vilnius Japanese vice consul, Chiune Sugihara, for these transit visas. Sugihara wired Tokyo three times for permission to help the refugees, but was denied each time. The vice consul was a Japanese career diplomat, but he had also been raised in a middle-class samurai family. And part of the code of the samurai is benevolence and mercy, and appreciation and respect for life. Despite the risk to his career and his family, Sugihara ignored his direct orders and decided to do as much as he could. For the next month, he and his wife barely stopped to eat or sleep as they wrote out thousands of transit visas. My family was among the six thousand Jews Sugihara saved — the Sugihara Survivors.

I believed that the fundamentals of real estate were universal. That is, issues of supply and demand, demographics, capital flows, and so on were as relevant overseas as they were here at home.