Christine Blau 
Courtesy of Amazon
Amazon’s former Vice President of International True Estate and Facilities John Schoettler speaking at a fundraising occasion for Seattle nonprofit Mary’s Area in 2018.
Amazon has tapped a Harvard-educated designer with working experience in drafting municipal land use policies as its new vice president of throughout the world company authentic estate and services.
Amazon named Shannon Loew to the position formerly held by John Schoettler, who will remain with the company, the Austin Small business Journal documented. Loew’s using the services of comes as Amazon begins a “years-lengthy transition” that will direct to Schoettler’s eventual retirement, the ABJ claimed, citing anonymous sources.
Amazon’s previous serious estate director below Schoettler, Patrick Miller — who joined the Seattle giant in 2018 — left at the close of previous calendar year and grew to become the senior director of world wide workplace services for Snap Inc., in accordance to his LinkedIn profile.
Loew founded Resolve Effects Progress in 2008, a Seattle-dependent serious estate design agency that marries layout, coverage and strategic management initiatives, in accordance to his LinkedIn profile. With Resolve, Loew centered on helping developers with urban redevelopment projects, helped formulate land use policies for towns, developed construction field solutions and introduced economical housing endeavors, in accordance to his LinkedIn web site. He was earlier chairman of the Seattle Layout Commission when Amazon created its downtown place of work campus, ABJ reported. Loew gained a Master of Architecture from the Harvard College Graduate School of Structure.
Loew’s using the services of will come as the online retail big has been wrestling with a bloated real estate portfolio, specifically its warehouse empire, which skyrocketed throughout the depths of the pandemic.
Very last yr, Amazon diminished its prepared and operational warehouse utilizes by 30M SF by way of subleasing warehouse house, canceling leases in exiting more mature, lesser warehouses or scrapping options to occupy new deals, according to an analysis by MWPVL and Inexperienced Road. MWPVL, which tracks the e-commerce’s true estate moves, observed that Amazon even now has up to 20% excessive industrial capacity in the U.S.
Schoettler is mostly credited for expanding Amazon’s actual estate empire, pushing the business portfolio from 1M SF when he started in 2001 to additional than 44M SF throughout 400 places of work in 54 international locations.
He was also closely involved in the Amazon HQ2 course of action, representing the organization in heated community meetings after it chose Arlington, Virginia, and New York Metropolis in 2018 as metropolitan areas in which to build two new headquarters. Soon after months of heavy pushback, Amazon canceled its 25,000-job commitment to Queens. It has considering that opened huge workplaces in Manhattan without the need of a public sweepstakes.
Amazon announced before this thirty day period options to reduce 18,000 careers, the premier selection of layoffs for any of the major tech headcount reductions declared this past calendar year. It is as but unclear what that involves its huge business office footprint — Microsoft, Meta and Salesforce have all introduced plans to reduce their true estate footprints along with their headcounts.
CORRECTION, JAN. 26, 4:10 P.M. ET: Pronouns in this story have been updated to replicate the fact that Shannon Loew is a man.
