Remembering Inland’s Dan Goodwin: Industry Leadership, Public Service, Philanthropy

As chairman & CEO of the Inland Group, Dan Goodwin made notable accomplishments in a wide variety of fields. Photo credit: Business Wire

In 1968, when Dan Goodwin and three fellow Chicago schoolteachers started a single-family homebuilding company as a sideline, they had no idea that they were launching an industry giant. “We weren’t planning to become a diverse incubator of businesses,” he recalled in a 2013 CPE profile.

Yet during the remarkable half-century career that followed that modest beginning, Goodwin, who died Jan. 19 at 80, oversaw the growth of Inland Real Estate Group of Companies into one of the industry’s most powerful and diversified firms. Along the way, he made major contributions to education, philanthropy and public service.

Today, Inland’s activities encompass much of the commercial real estate market, from investment, finance and development to advisory services. Its interests range from office, industrial, retail and medical to self storage and multifamily. Its diversified affiliates have closed deals valued at $80 billion, raised $26 billion in capital and sponsored more than 800 investment programs. One affiliate alone, Inland Real Estate Acquisitions, has completed upward of $55 billion in transactions.

Six Inland affiliates have been listed on the New York Stock Exchange or merged with NYSE-listed companies. Those companies include Inland Real Estate Corp., which Goodwin served as chairman, and Retail Properties of America, which he founded.

Following Goodwin’s passing, Robert Baum, an Inland co-founder, is serving as the firm’s interim chairman. As part of the company’s planned succession strategy, the firm’s CFO, Anthony Chereso, has been appointed CEO.

Goodwin was also the founding chair of Nareit’s non-traded REIT council. In the 2013 profile, Nareit President & CEO Steve Wechsler described Goodwin’s contributions as providing “thoughtful leadership, building meaningful consensus and demonstrating the art of inclusion with his team at Inland, as well as with his peers in the industry.”

Dedicated to education

Ever since its founding as a homebuilder by Goodwin and his fellow principals—Baum, Joseph Cosenza and Robert Parks—Inland has been active in the residential sector. Its credits include thousands of units in New England, Florida, the Midwest and the Southwest. A statement released by Inland noted that Goodwin once remarked, “My aim has always been to democratize real estate and to help all people gain access to the dignity of calling a place their home.”

Goodwin served for a decade on the board of the Illinois Housing Development Authority Trust Fund and was a founding member of the Illinois State Affordable Housing Conference. In 1994, he founded New Directions Housing Corp., a nonprofit affordable housing developer.

Although Goodwin left teaching for good in 1973, he maintained a lifelong interest in education. He was chairman of Northeastern Illinois University for 10 years and served as a member of the board of governors. He was vice chairman of Benedictine University’s board of trustees, and the institution’s college of business is named after him, as is Northeastern Illinois University’s school of education. Among other contributions, Goodwin endowed a college scholarship program for disadvantaged inner-city students and started a program to help disabled students from school to the workplace.

Goodwin’s accomplishments in public service included leadership of the DuPage Airport Authority. At the time of his appointment in 2003, the agency was $26 million in debt and ran persistent operating losses. Under Goodwin’s leadership, the authority turned a profit, retired its debts and reduced its property tax levy from $18 million to $6 million.

Summing up his views, Goodwin once observed, “In business, you are always pursuing growth and higher profits. That is how success is measured,” according to the company statement. “But there is also a responsibility to do good when one has done well. For me, that is a more rewarding definition of success.”