Debra Cafaro
| Debra Cafaro | |
|---|---|
| Born |
15 December 1957 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Businessperson |
| Spouse(s) | Terrance K. Livingston (m. 1983) |
| Children | 2 |
Debra A. Cafaro, born December 15, 1957 is an American business executive, who is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Ventas, Inc.(NYSE:VTR), an S&P 500 healthcare real estate investment trust (REIT) with enterprise value of $37 billion that owns nearly 1,300 healthcare properties located through the U.S., Canada and the UK. Cafaro joined Ventas in 1999 as CEO and President when the company’s market cap was about $200 million and it was in dire financial shape and has been widely credited with the Company’s turnaround and its subsequent success.
Under Cafaro’s leadership, Ventas was named the most successful financial publicly traded company for the first decade of the new century and in 2013 Ventas was voted as one of the world’s most admired real estate companies by Fortune magazine. Ventas is well-regarded for sustaining long-term performance; for the 16 years ended December 31, 2015, total shareholder return was 3,981.3 percent, compared with 507.5 percent for the MSCI US REIT Index and 89.0 percent for the S&P 500 Index. The Company's compound annual total shareholder return (TSR) has exceeded 27 percent since January 1, 2000.
Cafaro has received many professional recognitions. Harvard Business Review has named Cafaro in its list of the top 50 "Best Performing CEOS" in the world for 2016, 2015 and 2014. She is one of only 30 CEOs named by Harvard Business Review for three consecutive years and one of only two women on this year’s list. In 2016, Forbes Magazine recognized Cafaro as one of The World's 100 Most Powerful Women and also identified her as the Top-Performing Women CEO by Total Return, which was estimated at 2,373 percent since she assumed the leadership role at Ventas in March 1999. In 2015 GlobeSt.com named her as one of only nine "game-changers" in commercial real estate during the last 15 years. In recognition of her outstanding success and track record in business in both the U.S. and the world, she was selected by Crain's Chicago Business as one of the "Most Powerful Women in Business," she was named three years in a row by Modern Healthcare as one of the "100 Most Influential People in Healthcare" and she was named by Modern Healthcare as one of the "Top 25 Women in Healthcare" for the third time in 2017. She was also selected as one of the "Top 50 Women in World Business" by the Financial Times. In June 2017, Cafaro was nominated Chair-Elect of the Real Estate Roundtable after serving a term as secretary. Her term as Chair of the Real Estate Round Table will begin July 2018.
Cafaro was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to a working class Catholic family; she has one younger sister. Her mother, Dee Francis, was first generation Christian Lebanese who grew up in an Arabic speaking household in Washington PA; she graduated as valedictorian of her high school class. Her father was born in Pittsburgh to a first generation Italian family with 13 children. His immigrant father and mother owned restaurants and bars; her father worked as a letter carrier for the US Postal Service. In 1966, her father began to learn about rare coins. Pretty soon, he would take his post office paycheck and have it cashed in silver dollars. Then, the entire family would go through the coins to identify the valuable ones. By 1970, he was able to open his own rare coin store in the Grant Building in Downtown Pittsburgh. Cafaro, who was the first in her family to go to college, said that her father used his earnings from the coin store to pay for her undergraduate education at University of Notre Dame. She has said that her hard-working, close-knit family has been the inspiration for her work ethic as well as her love of sports, especially the Pittsburgh Steelers. Cafaro said that when she was 16 she became transfixed with the Watergate hearings and decided she wanted to be either a lawyer or journalist. Her father introduced her to a prominent criminal defense attorney, Tom Livingston, who introduced her to his son Terry, then a high school student who had decided to attend Notre Dame, which Cafaro was also interested in attending. Cafaro and Terrance K. Livingston married in 1983 and are the parents of two adult children.
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