Jackson-Shaw Chairman Lewis W. Shaw, who built a small Dallas firm into a real estate development titan, has died. He was 82.
Shaw was raised in Dayton, Ohio, and graduated from Wittenberg University in Springfield before serving in the United States Air Force, where he was a cryptologist and flight instructor. He arrived in Dallas to work for IBM in 1974.
“I’d always wanted to be a Texan,” he told the Dallas Morning News in 2004. His father was an orphan, raised in the Buckner Children’s Home in Dallas, and was killed at a railroad crossing when Shaw was 4. As a child, Shaw spent summers with an uncle in Aransas Pass.
Shaw met Jim Jackson at Addison Airport when Jackson asked Shaw to give him aerobatic lessons, and Jackson hired Shaw as a salesman at his four-person real estate firm Jackson Companies. Shaw took over the company after Jackson died in a plane crash in 1976 and renamed it two years later.
Under Shaw’s leadership, Jackson-Shaw developed more than 63 million square feet of industrial and hospitality real estate nationwide, including hotels in Las Vegas, Phoenix and Fort Worth, as well as nondescript low-rise office and industrial buildings tucked into major cities.
He was known for financing his own projects and hanging onto assets the firm developed rather than selling them off.
“I don’t build with somebody else’s MasterCard,” Shaw told the Dallas Morning News in 2004. “My first priority is who will pay the rent, not who will buy the project. It’s cash flow, not cashing out.”
Part of his development strategy for light industrial development was to find land that nobody wanted.
“I don’t want to join the crowd. I want to get there before it assembles. Proof of low demand for me is proof of opportunity,” he said in 2004.
Shaw co-founded American General Hospitality in 1980. Its portfolio fell into distress after the global stock markets crash of 1987, and lenders took nine of its properties, but Shaw continued to manage them.
The hospitality company became a publicly traded REIT in 1996 and later merged with Meristar REIT and Interstate Hotels & Resorts.
Shaw was known as a reader and a music lover who had a casual style of dressing and a contrarian spirit.
“Lewis is a lone wolf avoiding the herd mentality yet fiercely loyal to his friends and partners,” NAI Global Chairman Tom Lynn said in 2004.
A list of survivors wasn’t immediately available.
Shaw was inducted into the North Texas Commercial Association of Realtors Hall of Fame in 2003. He also served on the Wittenberg University Board of Directors and was actively involved in numerous civic and national organizations. A dedicated aviator, he had a lifelong passion for flying and traveled extensively in his own aircraft.
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