Photo Credit: Breonny Lee

BY Taylor Adams Cogan

Today, many know Madison Partners from seeing its bright green, flower-like logo on a property’s window. At the same time, they may not realize that a reason their favorite restaurant has been there for decades is due to the efforts of the real estate group, led by Susan Reese.

She knows what she’s good at, and she surrounds herself with others who have complementing skills and talents. The smaller company runs authentically and smoothly, and Reese has been running it off and on since the early 1990s – when she was abruptly thrown into it.

“I fell into this because of who I married, honestly. Lou was the empire builder, the one who had vision, and that changed in 1992-1995 when he went to prison,” she says.

Lou was sentenced for defrauding bank regulators.

“I was the Girl Scout leader, the full-time mom: I loved being at the schools, being on the boards. I had to rearrange my priorities to get down here and figure out how to run things while he was gone.”

Madison Partners had been acquiring property in Deep Ellum since the 1970s, so the company had a solid foundation. Decades later, Susan was making it her own. Lou would return and lead again, but his unexpected death at age 58 shook the family of five and prompted Susan to take the reins yet again.

“The bad part was that he passed away. The redeeming part, because of what had happened previously, was that I already knew what to do,” she says.

Susan – who holds a master’s degree in psychology and is also a doula – admits she probably would’ve been a midwife before now if things had gone differently. But she’s found her place running Madison, which has tenants such as AllGood Cafe and Pete’s Dancing Marlin.

“My approach is really different than Lou’s was: He was an empire builder. I only buy things if they make sense for our little company,” she says. “I know what we’re good at, and I know what we aren’t good at. Almost everything we own is family-owned – we have a few properties that have partners, but not many.”

Susan leads a small staff, one that includes a legacy with her daughter Katie Reese and two “right-hand men” who round out her vision, Larry Vineyard and Jon Hetzel.

“They hand the real estate to me. I’m grateful to have it profitable, but I don’t want to talk to corporate sketchers, it’s not interesting to me,” she says. “What I like is Deep Ellum, Lower Greenville Ave., Oak Lawn. I know my tenants, and I know how they operate. If they’re not successful, we’re not successful.”

One example of how the company operates is from 2020, when some landlords were sending letters to their business owners with a message similar to, “Just because there’s a global pandemic doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay rent.”

“We got on the phone with all of our tenants, saying, ‘Lock up, go home, don’t worry about rent – stay safe until we can figure this out.’ We went to our lenders asking if they could help us at the other end, all the local lenders said sure,” she says. “Almost all of our tenants survived. I’m really proud of that.”

Susan is now in her mid-70s: No, you would never guess this when talking with her. She has no interest in being retired, but she is enjoying a semi-retired life, letting others take lead while she pursues hiking and fly fishing in Montana. She even leads a book club that’s going on 45 years.

“I want to stay involved. I don’t know what my friends do who are retired. I don’t want that, I don’t think that would be good for me,” she says.

So, she’s also getting more adventurous traveling alone, and she’s exploring writing a book, one that shares stories from Lou’s time in prison – from both his and her perspectives.

“Lou was a great writer. He wrote a lot when he was in prison – stories, essays, poetry – he was determined he was going to get the most out of the experience as he could,” she says. “I started writing from my experience as the one who was in prison but not incarcerated: the whole family goes to prison when one goes.”

Some stories are funny, really sad, or poignant, she says, but the process of creating the book alone has been a rewarding experience.

“I’m a good writer for a first draft, but I really had never gone through an editing process, that’s really a different thing. I have a wonderful editor I was turned onto by Will Evans,” she says. “It’s really good for my brain. We do one segment at a time and send them out to literary journals. We have three published so far, and eventually a book.”

Whether writing, fishing, or taking care of tenants and their aging buildings, Susan still cares deeply for Deep Ellum and its East Dallas neighbor Lower Greenville.

“I think about the original guys, Don Blanton, Don Cass, Lou, Arvel Jernigan, that old guard is gone, most people don’t think of the old- timers anymore, which is fine,” she says. “I’m really proud of what we’ve done. We’re very careful about what tenants we go to, it’s never just the highest-paying person.

“This is not what I would’ve been doing without Lou. I don’t have that kind of vision that he did.
I want him to get all the credit.”