Pete Lash co-founded Beacon Partners in 1989. The West Point graduate and former office leasing broker just wanted to get into real estate ownership and grow a portfolio.
Lash loved the sink-or-swim dynamic of the real estate business. In his first few years running Beacon, the culture was focused on getting deals done and working long hours, he said.
In the mid-1990s, one of his roughly half-dozen employees was starting a family. She was the only Beacon team member who was married, Lash said, and she felt her personal life wasn’t valued by the company. She quit Beacon due to feeling undervalued and misunderstood, Lash said. He called it a “gut punch.”
The move eventually led to a wholesale reimagining of Beacon’s culture.
“I never set out to be a leader or a manager,” Lash said. “I wanted to be a real estate guy. I look back with the perspective I have now, and I had it completely backwards. It wasn't all about me or a few achievers and what we could do. It was really about building a team.”
Lash’s pivot fueled Beacon’s meteoric rise.
The firm has completed numerous significant projects in Charlotte in the office, industrial and mixed-use sectors. Beacon’s development portfolio includes The Station at LoSo, The RailYard in South End, Carolina Logistics Park in Pineville and Metrolina Park in north Charlotte, among many others.
Beacon developed about 4.5 million square feet in the region from 2020 to 2024, according to Charlotte Business Journal research. That ranked No. 2 among all developers. In addition, Beacon manages 13.9 million square feet of property locally to rank sixth by that measure, according to CBJ data.
For his role in founding, growing and leading Beacon, Lash has been named the winner of the Pillar Award in CBJ’s 2025 Heavy Hitters Commercial Real Estate Awards program.
The Pillar Award identifies someone whose work has created a significant impact in the region's commercial real estate sector. Honorees have played a critical role in the growth of Charlotte, driven innovation and excellence in commercial development and shown exemplary leadership and service in the industry and the community.
Lash joins a list of past honorees that includes Peter A. Pappas, Johnny Harris, Tony Pressley, Smoky Bissell, David Furman, Bob Bertges, Todd Mansfield and Fred Klein.
Earlier this year, Lash stepped down as Beacon’s president and managing partner. He remains the chairman and has been followed as president by Pete Kidwell.
Lash co-founded Beacon with Ed Weisiger Jr., another towering figure in the Charlotte business community. Weisiger’s family leads Weisiger Group — formerly known as CTE and Carolina Tractor & Equipment — which is one of the market’s largest private companies.
Lash and Weisiger have taken turns pointing the finger at one another when asked who gets the credit for Beacon’s success. At a talk with students last year at Queens University, Weisiger said Lash “attracted a ton of people to grow Beacon out.” He added that, “all I did was provide capital, help network and help set strategy."
Lash called Weisiger a “one-of-a-kind” and “special” guy, whose acumen was vital in Beacon’s growth. Their shared humility aligns with Beacon’s culture, which Lash said includes many great team members instead of a few superstars.
"I don't think in my wildest dreams I ever thought Beacon could be what it is now,” Lash said. “Somebody else could have partnered with Ed and it could be three times what it is today and a better company.”
Lash is looking forward to spending more time with his wife, Kelli, and four children after handing off the day-to-day duties of running Beacon. He is also planning to focus on philanthropy.
Lash has ingrained those efforts into Beacon’s culture. Among its philanthropic pursuits is the annual Six on Six Volleyball Classic, which the firm hosts alongside Childress Klein. The annual tournament has raised $1.75 million since 2008 for local charities.
Lash himself has worked on multiple philanthropic and industry causes, including serving in leadership roles with YMCA of Greater Charlotte and the Charlotte chapter of NAIOP.
Lash leaves Beacon in the hands of Kidwell, whose leadership team includes managing partner Walker Gorham in Raleigh and senior partner Tim Robertson in Charlotte. Longtime Beacon veterans Jon Morris and Mike Harrell, who have each been with the firm since the mid-1990s, are also remaining on the team as senior partners in Charlotte.
Lash knows the company is well suited to continue growing. Beacon is adding more projects in Raleigh and recently hired a partner to lead its multifamily development division. The Beacon culture is key to the growth trajectory.
“People ask me how we have so many great people at Beacon,” Lash said. “Well, they all hired each other. They protect what we have.”
Lash sat for an interview with CBJ upon being named the Pillar Award honoree. He discussed his career, Beacon’s growth story and his future plans. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you and Ed Weisiger come together? How did you get into this space? What led to the founding of Beacon?
First of all, people give me a lot of credit, and they talk about us co-founding the firm. The fact is that this was Ed's idea from the start. I went back to graduate school and took a job out of grad school as an office leasing agent in Raleigh. This is like the late 1980s, when the market was falling apart. A year or so into that job, I was feeling like I didn't have a future there.
I love the real estate business because you can achieve what you can achieve, and you can fall flat on your face. I found that very motivating. There is no real ceiling.
So, I was ready to do something.
Ed Weisiger tied up 90 acres of land for a business park. As I was getting antsy one day, the phone rang. I had met him a couple of times, but I didn't know him very well. He called me up and said, “Why don't you come down to Charlotte, look at this site, we'll meet some people and maybe there's an opportunity here we can pursue together?”
So, I was ready to launch. I had never been to Charlotte before. I came down here one day and spent the bulk of the afternoon with him, met a couple of real estate brokers and looked at the land. At the end of the day, we shook hands and said, “Let's get into business together.” I moved here two weeks later.
Were there any turning point moments that accelerated Beacon's trajectory?
I describe the first 20 years of Beacon as Beacon 1.0. And then the last 15 years is Beacon 2.0 because we went through the Great Financial Crisis. We were no different than a lot of other companies. It was just a battle. If you had debt — and especially if you had loans on buildings that weren't full — bankers were being told from corporate to get loans paid off or paid down. It was a two-year battle where we had to go raise some money and really focus on selling properties that we weren't ready to sell. We got through that situation, and it brought so many things to light that we could've been doing so much better.
Coming out of the crisis, we started sticking to our knitting and focusing on things we really understood, which for us was industrial properties in high-growth markets. We focused on geographies that we really knew. A lot of companies have taken growth opportunities and gone into five or six other markets. We chose to stay and become a big player in the Charlotte market. We're now trying to do the same in Raleigh. The better information you have, the better investor that you are. We also started on more long-term strategies.
We worked on our portfolio risk versus just project risk. Maybe one of the bigger things, too, was we worked on our capital. We don't have a family office. We don't have an investor that we invest for. We're out raising money every time we do a deal. So, we went out to a more diverse group, and we've put ways in place where we could have greater liquidity both for defense and for office. In 2011, we made a really big buy and kept that acquisition and development momentum going. It has really picked up speed in the last five years or so, since the Covid situation.
Beacon is known for being ahead of the market with new development — particularly with industrial projects like Metrolina Park and Carolina Logistics Park. It seems you're always on to the next big thing or have it in the works. What went into the thinking of those locations and those projects? And what does it say about Beacon's strategy?
We didn't try and execute a growth plan in three markets at the same time. We were just hyper-focused on Charlotte. We probably had three or four production people looking for sites and buildings to buy in Charlotte. When you're out there a lot, you have a good sense of where the sites are and what the value should be and what tenants really want and which corridors are good growth corridors. Those projects like Metrolina happened in the 2010s, but we were working on that site back in the 1990s. It just took that long to get ahold of that property. With CLP — the logistics park in Pineville — Jon Morris worked on that relationship for close to 10 years. It's like being a local. So much of our competitors' capital comes from outside the market. The decision-making happens somewhere else. That is one great advantage for us. We’ve always raised capital from groups and families that trusted us to make the decisions. So, we can act quickly.
When you're a big player in the market, it is easier to make things happen. Our investment in Charlotte paid off with some marquee properties.
Where do you see Beacon continuing to grow after the leadership transition from yourself to Pete Kidwell?
Going back eight or nine years, I began thinking about and talking to Ed about how are we going to gracefully shift this? Do we want this to be a family business that you and I and Jon Morris and Mike Harrell are part of? Or do we want Beacon to be around for the long term?
We very quickly came to the conclusion that we want this to be a thriving company for years to come, and to be a place that provides for families and people and makes a difference in the community.
When we were going through all of that, it was very intimidating to me to think about growth markets and growing without knowing that we had a transition plan in place. I went out and talking to a lot of people trying to bring somebody in. I hired a recruiter and played the game for a few years. I realized that was a big ask, to ask somebody to come to Charlotte and move their family and fit into the Beacon culture. I was very picky.
It was about that time that Pete Kidwell emerged. He's a young guy, but he's loved by people in our company. He gets our culture. He makes really good decisions. The one thing he was lacking was experience. Over the last three years, we worked on this transition, so that Pete is now taking my place. And he has a team around him — Walker Gorham in Raleigh and Tim Robertson here, with Jon and Mike staying on as senior partners. With that team, along with our positions — the property portfolio and the pipeline — I just think Beacon is in the best position it has ever been in. I mean that, because we've gotten to a size where we can do more. We've just hired, in the last couple of months, a guy named Zach Spencer who is going to lead our multifamily division. We've been looking for that person for a while.
We decided we don't want to be the biggest apartment developer in the Southeast. But we want to take advantage of the sites and the relationships we have.
I think Beacon, in the future, does probably expand to another market. It gets into this new property type. And I think we just continue to work on quality over quantity.
What are your plans for your next chapter?
That whole transition has put me in a position where I feel free to go pursue things. The transition has gone well. We still have things to do, and it will take time before they fully get on their feet. But I can be an investor and an adviser to them. A big thing for me is I have a wonderful family, my wife and four young adult kids. I look forward to being free to spend more time with them.
But I feel like the word for me in the next chapter of my life is stewardship. I have been given a lot of great things, relationships, positions and resources. I want to be a great steward of that. I am really excited about some community causes. I don't have it all figured out about how that is going to work. But I want to have an impact and to make a difference. That fires me up. It has always fired me up. It has fired me up here while we were growing Beacon. But now, it may be time to spend more time doing that.