I have always believed that every day you choose to hold an asset, you are also choosing to buy it. Would I buy our buildings at the price Blackstone… - Sam Zell

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

work out every morning at 4:45, I’m at the office by 6:30 a.m., and I don’t get home from work until 7:00 at night.

I looked at each property and figured out how much debt service it could handle based on its existing cash flow. I’d restructure the debt at a lower interest rate and put $1 down on the property along with a limited cash-flow guarantee to ensure the institution would not go into default while waiting for the market to recover.