LEGEND AWARD
2024
John Flake
Flake & Company
John Flake is truly a legendary figure in Arkansas’ commercial real estate industry. Flake grew up with real estate as the family business. It included working with his brother, Dickson Flake at Barnes Quinn Flake and Anderson before he founded his firm, Flake & Kelley Commercial, in 1979. In 2020, he joined his daughter's company, Flake & Company as Chief Real Estate Advisor. Flake is highly dedicated to downtown Little Rock and his vision has always been to strengthen the downtown skyline. He developed the 40-story Simmons Bank building, originally developed as Capitol Tower in 1986. Flake has successfully completed dozens and dozens of projects for healthcare institutions, as well as office, retail and multiple energy solutions projects. His client portfolio includes Baptist Health, Walmart, Dillard’s, Verizon, Acxiom, Entergy and the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas. Flake has been a Certified Commercial Investment Manager (CCIM) for 50 years and is a member of the Commercial Real Estate Council of Metro Little Rock (CREC MLR), Arkansas Real Estate Association, the Little Rock Real Estate Association and the National Association of Realtors. He is also affiliated with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Big Brothers of Pulaski County, the Greater Little Rock Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Partnership, served the Little Rock National Airport Commission, and many other organizations.
2024
Timothy Grooms
Quattlebaum, Grooms & Tull PLLC
Tim Grooms is a founding member of Quattlebaum, Grooms & Tull PLLC. He represents banks, health care managers, real estate developers, real estate brokers, and other clients in a variety of transactional matters. Grooms has substantial experience in real estate and general commercial lending transactions and has negotiated hundreds of retail, office and commercial space leases on behalf of major national retailers and numerous developers, landlords and tenants throughout Arkansas and the Mid-South. Among completed transactions, Grooms lists numerous retail shopping center developments, mixed-use horizontal property regimes, apartment complexes (including units providing low-income housing), office buildings, educational institutions, hotels, hospitals, related clinics and ancillary facilities, and charitable non-profit developments. As legal counsel to Simmons Bank Arena in North Little Rock, he assisted with property assemblage and condemnation and later handled all other legal aspects for the Arena, including construction, management, and operational matters. He was real estate development counsel for Heifer Project International regarding land acquisition and development of its present World Headquarters and represented the owners of the present site of the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Park. He was also involved in the redevelopment of the Mann on Main and Arcade Building and served as legal counsel for numerous projects in the River Market. Grooms is a Fellow of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers (ACREL), a Fellow in the American College of Mortgage Attorneys (ACMA), a member and former officer in the state chapter of the ICSC. He serves as counsel to numerous banking and real estate industry groups, including the Arkansas Community Bankers, Arkansas Rural Rental Housing Association, Arkansas REALTORS® Association (including numerous local REALTOR® boards), the state chapter of the Building and Office Management Association (BOMA), and Commercial Real Estate Council of Metro Little Rock (CREC MLR).
2023
Rick Ashley
Ashley Group
Rick Ashley started reading leases for his father when he was a teenager and knew early in his life that real estate development was what he wanted to do. Rick’s drive and passion echoed his father’s: the only piece of real estate they wanted was the one next to the one they already owned.
Significant projects special to Rick include Ashley Square, where he cut down a mountain to fill in a pond below to make a home for TJ Maxx and Drug Emporium, tenants which are still there 35 years later. There are many other similar projects in Arkansas, Michigan, New Mexico, and Mississippi.
Rick was integral in the restart of Twin City Bank, which became Centennial Bank. He sits on the board of Centennial’s parent company (HOMB) as well as the Centennial Bank Board of Directors and Regional Bord for Little Rock and Cabot. With a special talent for making and nurturing relationships with people, Rick has given generously to charities and been a big supporter of the NLR Chamber of Commerce.
2023
Gus Vratsinas
Bailey Construction
Born and raised in Little Rock, Gus Vratsinas always knew he wanted to build. He studied civil engineering to prepare, then spent his entire career building Little Rock. His favorite part of the process is the start – the stuff that goes before the construction begins. As general contractor for what has become the Simmons tower, Gus spent 1984-86 defining the Little Rock skyline. A challenge for that build was wind testing for the window wall. He worked with an engineering school to build a model of Little Rock and used computer nodes to find out where and how the wind currents worked.
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Another special project for Gus happened while he was the project manager for McCain Mall and the owner of the land opposite the mall wanted to build a strip center. Gus’ filing system created the name because his files for the new project were kept as The Other Center to distinguish it from the mall.
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A project especially close to his heart is his church, Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church. Gus grew up in the church when it was located downtown, and realized the footprint of the church left it no space to grow. He could see 10 steps ahead, so in the 1980s he led a charge to move west to the current location on Napa Valley Drive; then in the 2000s led an expansion of the facility.
2022
James E. Hathaway Jr
Hathaway Group
Big Jim or The Big Kahuna moved with his wife and three young sons to Little Rock in 1965. He made a “coin flip” decision to join Rector-Phillips-Morse as a real estate broker, launching a career that would last through his retirement in 2019 after 54 years of providing superior commercial real estate service to a long list of satisfied clients. Along his path he founded a company that has included three generations of Hathaways and reached levels of achievement beyond his dreams.
Notable transactions in which Jim played a key role:
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Assemblage of 160 acres for Koger Office Park (now Westlake Corporate Park)
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Sale of 157 acres for a new North Little Rock campus of Baptist Hospital
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Assemblage of 100 acres that would become Shackleford Crossing
2022
Jimmy Moses
Moses Tucker Partners
Jimmy comes from a family with a long history in Little Rock. His great-grandfather, Herman Kahn, was involved in real estate in the early 20th century and among other things developed the Marion Hotel. His grandfather Cleveland Moses started Moses Melody Shop in 1917 on Little Rock’s Main Street and provided Jimmy with his first real job as a teenager in the early 1960s. Having been around and worked in a family-owned business, it isn’t surprising that he carried on that tradition. Jimmy Moses founded Moses Tucker Real Estate in 1984 and serves as Moses Tucker partners Co-Chairman of the Board, working along with his son, Chris.
Jimmy’s first business passion is the ongoing redevelopment of downtown Little Rock. He always wanted Arkansas and Little Rock to be great places to live. His way of trying to make a difference here has been to recreate a vibrant and exciting downtown, not unlike the downtown he remembers as a kid growing up in the 1950-60s.
2020
Dickson Flake
Colliers | Arkansas
Dickson Flake began his career in commercial real estate in 1965. In 1971, he co-founded Barnes, Quinn, Flake & Anderson, Inc. (now Colliers | Arkansas) and was a managing partner and shareholder until 2002. He continued to work as an advisor and consultant with the firm until his death. Over the course of his 55-year career, Dickson played a role in several of Little Rock’s major developments including the 30-story Regions tower, Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield’s downtown Little Rock headquarters, USAble Corporate Center, Breckenridge Village, the Arkansas Department of Human Services downtown Little Rock headquarters, and Alltel Arena (now Simmons Bank Arena). Among his long list of professional accomplishments, he was named the Arkansas Real Estate Association Realtor of the Year in 1971, was invited in 1974 to membership in the exclusive, 1,000-member American Society of Real Estate Counselors – the youngest person to be invited at that time – and was awarded the Clinton B. Snyder trophy from the Marketing Institute of the National Association of Realtors in 1982 for a complex exchange transaction involving a series of four parcels of land, 13 deeds and 10 parties. He was inducted into the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame in 2011 and was honored by Little Rock Rotary Club 99 as the 2020 Business & Professional Leader of the Year.