Fayetteville developer gains construction vet as co-owner

Fayetteville developer High Street Real Estate and Development has added a new owner with impressive construction credentials.

Jason Keathley joined the business earlier this year as a 50-50 owner with founding principal Ward Davis. Keathley previously worked at Fayetteville-based construction giant C.R. Crawford, a company he co-founded in 2006 with Cody Crawford.

“Jason hates when I say this, but he has to be one of the top five construction guys in Arkansas,” Davis said in a recent interview. “He’s who I trusted more in the construction business than anybody else in the world.”

Keathley said he left C.R. Crawford in search of something different. Because of a tragedy one year ago, Davis was searching for something, too. Their new business partnership fulfills both needs.

LEAVING THE RAT RACE
A Danville (Yell County) native, Keathley has 25 years of construction management experience. A $600 million resort and hotel in Hollywood, Fla., is one of his early career experiences before returning to Arkansas. He and Crawford earned construction management degrees from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. They later worked together for the Little Rock-based entity formerly known as Bell-Corley Construction Co.

That’s where their conversations began to start their own company, which has grown to be one of the region’s busiest and most recognizable general contractors.

“C.R. Crawford became a giant,” Keathley explained. “We had close to 100 employees, and it got to a point where I didn’t know the names of a lot of them.”

The scale wasn’t necessarily agreeing with him.

“I really enjoyed [working at] C.R. Crawford when it was small, and I knew everybody and their families,” he said. “I’ve been tired of the rat race for the last couple of years. It got to where it wasn’t fun.”

Late last year, Keathley asked the company’s other owners (Crawford and Scott Stokenbury) for a buyout.

“I was going to gather up my chips and buy old warehouses and apartments and clean ’em up,” he recalled. “I felt like I had a knack for that, construction-wise.”

Keathley said that other than his wife and two business partners at C.R. Crawford, Davis — one of Keathley’s clients — was the first person to know he was going through a buyout process to leave the company.

Keathley said that Davis responded with a better idea when he shared his plans for life after C.R. Crawford.

“You need some help,” Keathley asked.

“Yes,” Davis responded.

A TRAGIC TURN
High Street is an urban development company that builds new developments and redevelops properties in Northwest Arkansas’ downtowns. There are seven employees on the development side of the business — there’s also a separate brokerage division — and the company maintains Fayetteville headquarters in the Troy Gordon House, a single-story antebellum structure on West Township Street that’s been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1978.

Davis and Morgan Hooker were the company’s founding principals in 2015 when infrastructure work began on the firm’s initial project, Johnson Square, a 74-acre mixed-use development valued at approximately $200 million and situated mainly to the north of Johnson Mill Boulevard just off Interstate 49 north of Fayetteville.

The Johnson Square project continues, and High Street has other projects completed or ongoing, including Drake Farms in Fayetteville, The Gordon Hotel in Jasper (Newton County), The Fayetteville Mill District and The 1907 in downtown Rogers.

Davis said the firm is at a current run rate and staffed to develop $50 million to $75 million in projects annually. All of that work, however, continues without the man Davis said was the company’s visionary leader. Over the Memorial Day weekend in 2022, Hooker died of a heart attack during a recreational trip along the Little Buffalo River in Newton County. He was 51.

Davis said Hooker’s sudden death shocked friends and colleagues and left an irreplaceable void.

“He was my best bud and business partner for a long time,” he said.

Hooker’s High Street impact was twofold — his design eye and construction management expertise. He was a licensed general contractor in several states for over 20 years and had an extensive background in architecture, land planning, development and construction.

With an economics degree from Davidson College and an MBA from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Davis’ background is in finance and strategy.

“I don’t know how to swing a hammer,” he joked. “So, the second [Keathley] mentioned he wanted to get more in the development side, I thought this could be really good.

“It’s been a tough year in a lot of ways. When you lose a business partner and friend like that, you’ve got a lot of things to stabilize. [Keathley] has been a real godsend for me.”

ON THE HORIZON
Keathley and Davis agreed that their longtime friendship made a business partnership perfect, and they have complementary skill sets. They first met nearly 15 years ago and have been working together since 2015.

“One of the first things we did was identify three projects we could immediately start in this crazy market of high construction costs and interest rates,” Keathley said.

Those projects are in various design stages and represent about $57 million in development. The first will start later this summer. They include apartment projects in downtown Rogers and Johnson and a larger, 6-acre project in Johnson Square with medical office, commercial and food and beverage components.

“We haven’t talked publicly about that project yet, but we’re surprisingly ahead of the game with pre-leasing,” Davis said. “We’re in the very initial design stage on that.”

Along with the downtown-focused development here and there, High Street’s work remains primarily dominated by Johnson Square — Davis said work is about 20% completed — and Drake Farms in Fayetteville.

The Pendergraft Building, a two-story, 19,000-square-foot office building, opened last year and is Drake Farms’ first project. The property consists of several tracts of land purchased by the Pendergraft family over the past quarter-century. It lies north of West Drake Street and spans Gregg Avenue to Garland Avenue. It is a 175-acre mixed-use neighborhood to be developed incrementally over the next 25 years. Davis said the company will announce more development plans at Drake Farms this fall.

“We have a very robust and exciting pipeline,” Davis said. “If we didn’t pick up another property again, we would have a career’s worth of work.”