When Tom Heneghan wanted a different job inside Sam Zell’s organization, there was a condition: find someone to take his seat. His brother John later recalled the exchange. Tom recommended John. Zell hired him. For a career conducted among investment committees, public-company boards, and cross-border transactions, it is a pleasingly domestic opening. One accountant made room for another. Their father had been an accountant, too. The family business, in that sense, was counting.
The anecdote also introduces a question that follows Heneghan through his working life: what happens after you hand something over? A job needs a successor. A growing company needs management that can handle its next stage. An investment eventually needs another owner. His career has brought him to each of those moments, sometimes on opposite sides of the same table.
Today, from Chicago, he leads Equity International and chairs Equity LifeStyle Properties. The two positions connect a long apprenticeship in U.S. property operations with investments abroad. There are hotels in this story, and warehouses, and homes. The interesting part is the organization around them: the people entrusted with a business, and the years required to make it ready for its next owner.
The numbers came first
Heneghan holds a Bachelor of Arts from Augustana College. He began his career as a staff accountant at Peat Marwick, now part of KPMG, and then worked as a financial analyst at Nicor Gas. In 1990, he joined Equity Group Investments, the private investment company founded by Zell.
His assignments there ranged across Zell-related companies. They included Great American Management and Investments, a holding company with businesses in agricultural chemicals, fertilizers, building products, and manufacturing; Capsure Holdings, an insurance company; and Greenberg & Pociask, which provided financial services within the organization.
These were different businesses with different operating demands. The connection to his later investing career is an interpretation, but the sequence is concrete: Heneghan encountered multiple industries before spending years in the leadership of a property company. His résumé moved from financial work toward responsibility for the enterprise itself. A balance sheet can describe a business. Running one requires decisions about what to do tomorrow morning.
Learning the property business from inside
At Equity LifeStyle Properties, Heneghan became vice president, chief financial officer, and treasurer in 1995. In 2000, he became president and chief operating officer. In January 2004, he became CEO. He would hold that position until February 2013.
ELS’s business included manufactured home communities and resort communities. This chapter gave his career a substantial operating interval between accounting and international investment management. The titles mark changing responsibilities: finance, then operations, then the company as a whole.
By the time his next move was announced in October 2012, ELS owned or held interests in 382 properties across 32 states and British Columbia, with 141,077 sites. Those figures belong to that moment. They describe the scale of the company he was preparing to leave as CEO, rather than a claim about what he personally built.
The handover had several moving parts. Marguerite Nader, then ELS’s president, would become president and CEO on February 1, 2013. Paul Seavey took on the CFO responsibilities in October 2012. Heneghan remained on the board, becoming co-vice chairman when the transition took effect. His move changed his day-to-day job while preserving a formal connection to the company.
A crayon in a room full of MBAs
Later in 2013, Columbia Business School students visited Chicago. Heneghan, Nader, and Zell shared management and investment principles with the group. One instruction was memorable enough to survive almost any lecture: “Write with a crayon.” The point was to reduce complexity to its essence.
The group also heard about accountability, internal collaboration, and avoiding paralysis through excessive analysis. Conventional wisdom was a starting point to question. These were presented as Zell fundamentals, shared by the three executives together. They should be understood as the organization’s teaching, rather than a set of personal sayings invented by Heneghan.
The crayon is an amusing object to introduce into a room of future financiers. It offers limited precision, very little prestige, and absolutely no spreadsheet functionality. Yet the underlying instruction is practical: explain the decision clearly enough that someone else can understand it. In a career crossing countries and business models, that is a useful standard for any investment conversation.
“Write with a crayon.”
A Zell principle shared with visiting Columbia MBA students, 2013
The map grew larger
Heneghan took charge of Equity International in February 2013. The firm’s current description credits him with broadening its mandate across both asset classes and geographies. He oversees its activities and strategic direction and serves on its investment committee. He is also a senior managing director of Chai Trust Company, which serves trusts benefiting the Zell family.
International investing introduced another set of operating questions. In a 2014 interview about India, he discussed the importance of stable currency, inflation risk, and respect for investor capital. He saw encouraging changes, including the proposed framework for real estate investment trusts, while remaining attentive to restrictions and the country’s risk perception.
He could sound delighted by the physical scale of development, too. “The two countries that consistently take my breath away are India and China with the scale of things they do.” It is a revealing moment in a discussion otherwise occupied by regulations and returns. The accountant was looking up from the numbers.
Warehouses, bedrooms, and the company behind them
In September 2016, Equity International closed its first Asian-focused fund, ZEI Co-Invest 1 Fund, with $205 million in commitments. It was expected to invest alongside other capital in more than $2 billion of Asian logistics property projects developed by ESR. Heneghan highlighted the opportunities in Japanese warehouse assets.
The distinction between those two amounts matters. The commitments were the fund’s capital; the larger figure described the projects contemplated with other investors. Neither is a measure of Heneghan’s personal wealth. Both belong to the announced plan in 2016.
The underlying proposition brought an operating partner together with institutional capital. ESR’s logistics developments served a different customer from an Indian hotel, but the business structure offered a recognizable connection: capital supporting an organization capable of developing and managing physical assets.
Fund commitments, alongside other capital for planned logistics developments.
In March 2020, an Equity International affiliate invested in Stanza Living’s Series C round. The Indian shared living operator had built an inventory of close to 50,000 beds across ten key cities since its founding in 2017. These were the figures at the announcement, rather than a description of its present portfolio.
Heneghan’s stated priority was specific: “We support their focus on striking the right balance between scale and profitability.” The investment addressed accommodation for students and young professionals moving between cities. The appeal involved a service business around the rooms, including management and operational efficiency. The bed count told one part of the story; the business serving those beds supplied another.
Fourteen years between the blueprint and the exit
SAMHI provides a longer view of that process. Equity International made its first investment in the Indian hotel business in 2011, before Heneghan became the firm’s CEO. By April 2025, the portfolio described in its exit announcement covered 13 cities and 34 hotels, including three under development. Its more than 5,500 rooms included 700 under development.
The ownership transition happened in stages. Blue Chandra, an Equity International affiliate, sold approximately 49.8 percent of its original equity holdings alongside SAMHI’s September 2023 IPO. It sold another 27 percent of that initial interest in March 2024. The remaining 23.2 percent was sold on April 29, 2025.
Percentages of the affiliate’s initial equity holdings, not percentages of SAMHI.
Heneghan linked the final sale to the firm’s continuing portfolio management and approach to monetization. His comments emphasized the quality and prior hospitality experience of Ashish Jakhanwala and the SAMHI team. The sequence is instructive without an invented victory lap: an early investment, an operating platform, a public listing, and a completed exit.
The seat he kept
Heneghan’s activities also reached U.S. single-family rental and farmland. A December 2020 announcement described him as the founder of Madison Canal and related entities, managing assets for institutional investors that had invested more than $500 million in Home Partners of America. It also announced his appointment to Farmland Partners’ board and a $10 million share purchase agreement by an entity he controlled.
These roles sit alongside the overseas work, widening the picture beyond the firm’s name. His career includes operating leadership, board oversight, and investment structures connecting institutional money to property businesses. Each comes with a different kind of responsibility.
Then, in May 2023, the ELS board named him chairman under its succession plans following Zell’s passing. A decade after leaving the CEO role, Heneghan took the board’s chair. He had been co-vice chairman from 2013 to 2018 and vice chairman thereafter.
His tribute to Zell contained a concise observation: “Sam was uniquely comfortable being himself, even if it meant forging his own path.” It describes the mentor in Heneghan’s words, without requiring the pupil to become a replica.
The early family anecdote ends with a replacement found. The later career keeps returning to handovers on a larger scale: Nader assuming the ELS CEO role, SAMHI reaching the public markets, investors buying the shares another investor sells. Heneghan’s place in those stories rests on years of working with businesses through successive stages. The seat changes. The responsibility continues.