Sam Zell, a Chicago real estate magnate who earned a multibillion-dollar fortune and a reputation as “the grave dancer” for his ability to revive moribund properties died on Thursday. He was 81.

Zell died at home due to complications from a recent illness, according to Equity Group Investments, a company he founded in 1968.

Bearded and blunt-spoken, Zell reveled in bucking traditional wisdom. He had a golden touch with real estate, and got his start managing apartment buildings as a college student. By the time he reached his 70s, he had amassed a fortune estimated at $3.8 billion.

Zell sold Equity Office, the office-tower company he spent three decades building, to Blackstone Group for $39 billion in 2007. It was the largest private equity transaction in history, and Zell personally netted $1 billion.

A month later, he made another deal that ultimately tarnished his image: the acquisition of the ailing Tribune Co. for $13 billion. The media giant filed for bankruptcy the following year.

Real estate was his trademark, but as he noted in an interview shortly before making the ill-fated Tribune deal, it represented only about 25 percent of his holdings.

“I’m a professional opportunist,” Zell told The Associated Press at the time. “I’m pretty sure that no matter what topic you pick, we’re involved in some way or another.”

Zell was born in Highland Park, Ill., on Sept. 28, 1941, four months after his immigrant parents arrived in the United States. They fled Poland before the Nazi invasion.

His father was a wholesale jeweler who dabbled successfully in real estate investment and the stock market. The young Zell took pictures at his 8th-grade prom and sold them, and later took to buying Playboy magazines in downtown Chicago and reselling them to his classmates in Hebrew school in the suburbs for a 200 percent markup.

His first successes in real estate came while he was a student at the University of Michigan. After managing the building where he lived in exchange for free rent, he moved on to managing other properties, ultimately incorporating an apartment-management business and then selling it.

After working briefly at a Chicago law firm, he teamed with his Ann Arbor fraternity brother Robert Lurie and they began acquiring distressed properties from developers who were bogged down by high interest rates. That practice continued through the recession of the mid-1970s, with great success.

He later co-founded the Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business in 1999 with Lurie’s widow, Ann.

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