SALISBURY — After two-and-a-half years on the job, Karen L. Hobson has resigned as executive director of Historic Salisbury Foundation. She turned in her resignation last week.

“She has been a tremendous asset for the foundation,” board President Susan G. Sides said Tuesday. “She will be missed.”

Sides said Hobson brought a high level of energy and professionalism to the executive director’s job and sacrificed her other career pursuits to step in after the foundation lost Brian M. Davis in the fall of 2015.

Davis, who like Hobson is an architect by training, left Salisbury to take a preservation job in Louisiana.

When Hobson took the HSF job in March 2016, Sides said, she intended to be executive director for only a year to a year-and-a-half.

“We were lucky to have her as long as we could,” Sides said.

Hobson brought extensive real estate and redevelopment experience to the job.

A search committee is being formed to fill the position, Sides said.

A Salisbury native, Hobson returned to her hometown from New York in 2012 to restore the historic Wright-Hobson House that has been in her family for a half century. She served on HSF’s board of trustees from 2013 until accepting the executive director’s job.

In New York, Hobson founded Hobson Associates Limited in 1989 to further her interests in complex real estate deals. Over the years, her wide variety of clients included Miami Beach Redevelopment Agency, Yale University, Australian City Properties and the tourism ministry of Ghana, among others.

Hobson has a bachelor’s degree in environmental design from N.C. State University and a master’s in finance from the University of Chicago.

She is the daughter of the late Edwin S. “Teeny” and Helen Hobson of Salisbury. Her late aunt Anne Hobson Murdoch was a charter member and longtime board member of the historic foundation.

Historic Salisbury Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose mission is “to preserve, protect and revitalize the historic fabric of Salisbury and Rowan County.”