Shannon Loew, Amazon’s head of global real estate, is leaving after succeeding longtime leader

Shannon Loew, Amazon’s global real estate leader, is leaving the role he assumed last year after the retirement of longtime Amazon executive John Schoettler, the company confirmed to GeekWire on Friday.

“After almost three years at Amazon, Shannon has decided to pursue other opportunities outside of the company,” Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said in an emailed statement. “We appreciate all his contributions and wish him the best of luck.”

Loew, a design and real estate industry veteran, joined Amazon in January 2023 and started overseeing the day-to-day operations of the company’s Global Real Estate & Facilities team in early 2024 ahead of the retirement of Schoettler, who left Amazon after 23 years.

Schoettler oversaw the extraordinary growth of Amazon’s footprint in its Seattle headquarters region and beyond, leading the expansion of the tech giant’s office space from about 1 million square feet when he joined in January 2001 to more than 65 million square feet in more than 60 countries when he left.

Before joining Amazon, Loew founded Fix Impact Development, a real estate design company where he spent 14 years. He also founded Seattle-based Hatchback Cottages and was previously a designer at IDEO.

An affiliate fellow in the Runstad Center for Real Estate at the University of Washington, Loew holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard, a BA in environmental design from Vassar College and a professional degree in filmmaking from NYU.

In a podcast discussion in March with ZRG Partners, Loew shed light on his role at Amazon, the scale of the real estate portfolio he was in charge of, and other responsibilities.

“Being a real estate professional at a tech company is really different than being, say, in a private development sector,” Loew said. “You have a whole other series of forces and assumptions upon your decisions that aren’t normally there. And among them is the speed and decisions of how much you need to house and hire folks as a company grows and optimizes itself.”

Last year, Loew took part in a panel discussion with other corporate leaders, moderated by former U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, on the roles of the private sector in building and sustaining more equitable park systems.