Sam Zell, the commercial real estate "grave dancer" who made a fortune buying distressed office properties in the early 1990s, told a Boston audience today that there are no distressed real estate opportunities in the market "unless there’s volume, and right now there is no volume."

Zell made billions in a 2007 market-topping sale of his Equity Office portfolio to the Blackstone Group. He’s now chairman of Equity Residential, a nationwide multifamily investment firm.

Speaking at the Hynes Convention Center at the opening session of the Urban Land Institute’s Spring Council Forum, Zell said when he was buying office buildings in the early 90s, he’d go to a bank and "they’d have 10."

"I’d make an offer on one, and they’d either sell it to me or sell to nobody," he said.

This commercial real estate downturn hasn’t brought those same kinds of opportunities, Zell said. Other than hotels, the only distressed products available in any volume are "all this crap in the little banks," Zell argued.

"Instead of banks being inundated with REO’s, they’re taking them on one at a time, and by virtue of taking them one at a time, at the same time, there’s this vast amount of capital out there, it’s cushioning the change in pricing. Everybody talks about 30 percent to 40 percent declines in value, but we only have three or four examples to prove that," he said

"I don’t see any great equity investment opportunities on the real estate side in the U.S.," Zell added. "All our activities are in buying distressed debt in one form or another."

He joked that he’d run into an executive from the investment sales brokerage Eastdil Secured in the Hynes lobby. "If he’s smiling, that means he’s got one deal to sell now."

Equity Residential made several significant acquisitions in Manhattan recently, but, Zell said, "We’ve sold as many apartments as we bought. We got rid of Atlanta and Charlotte, and we’re just replacing them with markets that are long-term positive."