Billionaire real estate executive Sam Zell says it's inaccurate to say the pandemic sparked what's known as the Great Resignation. Instead, in his viewpoint, the phenomenon of millions of workers quitting as they work from home is really just a big excuse.

That's because many workers already had lost the passion for their current jobs, he said, and when the motivation of in-person accountability and oversight was replaced with isolation and Zoom calls, they also lost the external push to succeed. He said that's far more likely the bigger cause for the nearly 48 million people quitting their jobs last year, as lots of them may have looked in the mirror after a long stretch of working from home and asked themselves, "Am I doing what I want to do?"

"There is no substitute for motivation," he said at the inaugural Emory Real Estate Conference at The Whitley hotel in Atlanta's Buckhead district. "The 'Great Resignation' doesn't fit onto that premise."

Zell is chairman of Chicago-based Equity Group Investments and founder of several real estate investment trusts including Equity Residential and Equity Office Properties, which is now owned by Blackstone and called EQ Office.

He said successful and hardworking employees try to understand what motivates them, define what they want to be and what they have to do to get there professionally. The job jumpers and quitters "lost their mojo," Zell said, adding "I feel sorry for them," to the crowd gathered last week of real estate and business executives, scores of whom could be seen nodding in approval.

The number of workers quitting their jobs appears to be winding down as displaced workers begin returning to work. The labor force participation rate hit 62.2% as almost 1.4 million people re-entered the labor force, according to a February Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report, the highest rate since March 2020, when the pandemic began prompting widespread office shutdowns that prompted workers to toil at home.

During Zell's 45-minute chat moderated by Klaas Baks, an Emory Goizueta Business School professor and executive director of the Emory Center for Alternative Investments, Zell discussed a range of topics including the future of cryptocurrency, rising inflation and leadership attributes.

As for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Zell said he didn't think current stock market pricing reflects the overall impact of the war. When Baks asked if that meant Zell thought the market still would take a larger hit because of the conflict, he said yes.

As real estate and other companies work to replace employees who have resigned recently, Zell said recruiters and human resources executives should seek out candidates who understand more than opportunities in the marketplace.

The best candidates, Zell said, "make the effort to find the solution. It's also someone who sees the solution" and has an opinion about how to leverage it in the marketplace.

Zell, who was born in the United States about 90 days after his parents Rochelle and Bernard Zell emigrated from Poland with their daughter, said his father believed their new country had streets paved with golden opportunities, and as a result, "I didn't really know what I couldn't do."

Zell said opportunity presented itself when he got the chance early in his real estate investment days to buy a bunch of apartments for $10,000 per unit, or for about one-third of the $30,000 others were paying to build them. And sometimes luck makes for good opportunity as well, Zell said, like when he and his late partner Robert Lurie started investing in mobile homes in the mid-1980s.

"I knew of no one who owned a mobile home park" or anything similar, Zell said. "We just tripped over it."

As for the buzz about the work-from-home movement created during the pandemic, Zell said employees crave and benefit from interaction in the office, and evaluating workers via Zoom calls can be tough, he said.

"I don't know how you motivate by modem," Zell said.

MBK Rental Living, a California-based private developer and a division of MBK Real Estate that was established in 2012, has announced the retirement of President Craig Jones, and has promoted Ken McCarren, formerly vice president of asset management at MBK, to succeed him.

In his new role, McCarren will lead MBK Rental Living's acquisition, disposition, construction, management, planning and market research departments. McCarren joined the company in 2020 and brings over 30 years of experience in the multifamily business.

Jones joined MBK Homes in 2012 and helped establish MBK Rental Living as vice president of acquisitions and asset management, where he developed the firm's apartment investment strategy and helped source and acquire land for planned developments, before being named president in 2017.

Kim Pipkin has joined Newmark's San Rafael, California, office.

In her new role, Pipkin will handle landlord and tenant representation as well as investment sales for the office sector.

Pipkin is entering commercial real estate brokerage after a career in marketing and business development for the architecture, engineering and construction industries for Swinerton Builders, EHDD Architecture Interiors and Planning, and Quezada Architecture. She is an active member of Commercial Real Estate Women and serves on the governance committee and as a tri-chapter diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, liaison in San Francisco.