Debra Cafaro has been at the helm of the $26+ billion S&P 500 firm Ventas, one of the so-called "Big Three" healthcare real estate investment trusts (REITs) in the United States, since 1999. When she joined, she needed to turn around a $200 million REIT that had only one tenant, was $1 billion in debt, and couldn't make rent. Today, she is the longest-serving female CEO of an S&P 500 company and can boast the highest total return during her tenure: 2,373%. Ventas now owns more than 1,200 properties serving a large (and ever-growing), aging demographic.
Cafaro was born in 1957 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised by a working-class family. She earned her bachelor’s in government economics from the University of Notre Dame in 1979, then her doctorate in 1982 from the University of Chicago Law School.
The first half of Cafaro’s career was spent as a successful attorney. She had summer associate positions at the law firms Jones Day in Cleveland, Debevoise & Plimpton in New York, and Cleary Gottlieb in New York before spending a year as a judicial clerk to the Honorable J. Dickson Phillips, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. She then practiced real estate, corporate, and finance law from 1983 to 1997 and also taught as an adjunct professor at Northwestern University Law School from 1988 to 1992. In 1997, she joined Ambassador Apartments Incorporated, a multifamily REIT, as president and a director, and helped sell the company.
Since turning Ventas around, Cafaro has been widely recognized for her strategic vision and enduring business success. She has been named one of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women by Forbes Magazine twice, a Top 100 Best-Performing CEOs in the World for six consecutive years by Harvard Business Review, and has been recognized as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare six times by Modern Healthcare.
When asked for some of the best career advice she has ever received, Cafaro told REIT magazine, “If someone is asking you to do something, then they believe that you can do it [...] It sounds simple, but it was a real insight for me. I think it especially applies to a lot of women executives.”