Frederic D. Wolfe
Co-founder 1970Background
Frederic D. 'Fritz' Wolfe grew Wolfe Industries, his family's diversified Lima, Ohio construction business, into nursing-home real estate starting in 1963. In 1970 he co-founded the Health Care Fund with his Yale roommate Bruce Thompson, one of the first real estate investment trusts to focus exclusively on nursing homes and clinics. By the end of the decade the fund's assets had grown past $25 million, and it went public in 1971 as one of the first publicly traded healthcare REITs. The company was renamed Health Care REIT in 1985, moved to Toledo in 1986, and eventually became Welltower, with a portfolio Wolfe started growing to more than $25 billion by the late 2010s. Wolfe passed away in 2020, having lived to see the company he started with a single Ohio lumberyard investment grow into a multi-billion-dollar national healthcare REIT. Wolfe construction-industry background gave him an unusually practical, asset-level understanding of nursing-home real estate that purely financial investors of the era typically lacked.