Man behind Aspen Estates says ‘mission accomplished’ at last
Exclusive community’s Meridian project the ‘swan song’ for visionary entrepreneur
It started as a family homestead where Jim Quinn grew up alongside his 11 siblings. Five decades later, his childhood home has grown to 250 acres of multi-milliondollar estate home development — and become his legacy.
For the 66-year-old founder and president of QuinnCorp Communities, celebrating its 20th anniversary, the 1,000 lots spanning the 13 phases within Aspen Estates is “mission accomplished” of his original vision. Those phases stretch from the first, 13 estate-lot Aspen Lane, to his newest — the 68 villas, townhomes and lofts of Meridian in Aspen Estates he describes as his “swan song.”
“I saw an opportunity (in 1998) for an estate community at a time developers were doing cookiecutter products,” says the self-described “serial entrepreneur.”
Quinn, with only a high school education (though he has taken a “pocket MBA” course), at one time had the largest Apple dealership in Canada, only to launch another career as a land developer.
Now, the value of QuinnCorp’s Aspen Estates developments in Calgary ’s southwest Aspen Woods community has grown to between $1.5 billion to $2 billion. The Quinn family — including geologist dad Don — moved to Calgary from Texas and, in 1969, settled into a five-acre Springbank site.
In 1991, Quinn and his wife, Sandra, bought the property from his mother Myrna (his father died in 1987), where they raised their daughter.
While he had little previous experience with land investment — he had bought an eight-acre site in Radium — Quinn then amassed, through more than 100 meetings with 46 area landowners, the rest of the property — annexed by the City of Calgary — that became Aspen Estates.
“Many of the deals were done with a handshake, sitting in people’s kitchens,” says Quinn, whose brother Joe joined the company early on.
Quinn’s vision in 1998 was of a new Mount Royal or Pump Hill, neighbourhoods that, like those in Aspen Estates, were stitched together from small acreages to form Calgary’s most exclusive communities.
Marketed as Calgary’s Address of Distinction, the homes in Aspen Estates are all built on cul-de-sacs, with none facing main streets. Quinn says homebuyers bought into his vision slowly at the beginning, but embraced it as amenities such as private schools and shopping options came to the west end.
He opened his first showhome parade in Aspen Lane in 1998, followed by Aspen Meadows’ 60 lots (Meadows won the 2002 show home parade of the year award from the then-Calgary Region Home Builders’ Association).
Sales picked up steam when 10 per cent of employees from Imperial Oil (which moved its headquarters from Toronto to Calgary in 2004) were purchasing homes.
QuinnCorp’s last Aspen project, the Meridian, provides a lock-and-leave lifestyle for snowbirds and business professionals, while offering three-car garages, optional elevators and rooftop terraces.
Prices range from $1.1 million for the two- or three-bedroom lofts (from 2,979 square feet) to four bedroom townhomes at $1.5 million (3,330 square feet) to threebedroom villas (4,019 square feet) starting at $2 million.
Quinn says there will not be another estate development like Aspen Estates in Calgary, partly because of the increasing cost of land — in 2000, a quarter-acre lot was $200,000; by 2007 it was $600,000 — but also because of changing city policies, buyer attitudes and demographics.
“We are seeing the re-gentrification of the inner city and downtown core with its higher density.”
Quinn plans eventual retirement in Victoria, which means selling his family residence, the 10,000-square-foot Manor House (6 Aspen Ridge Lane S.W.) that is the centrepiece of the Aspen Estates development. Originally listed at $12.25 million, its new price tag — $8.95 million — reflects Calgary’s new economic reality.
And while there are still fourplus years of business ahead of him and QuinnCorp, Quinn says he has “100 per cent” accomplished what he set out to do 20 years ago.
“It was a mammoth task and there were some difficult years — the recession in 2008 that we crawled out of in 2009, and then 2014 hit — but this is absolutely my legacy.”