Meet a developer who specializes in difficult projects
Innovative developer has carved out a business by redoing older properties
Ivan Beljan is turning old building into new jewels, old strip malls into new hubs, and forgotten back alleys into new shopping areas.
Little wonder Beljan is known as Edmonton’s most innovative developer.
He was born to construction. He is from the north side of Edmonton, the son of a Croatian immigrant, Ante Beljan, who spent his life as a construction concrete specialist, with his son hearing all about it and sometimes working odd jobs at various sites.
His father worked long hours and always told his son, “If you don’t go to school, you’re going to end up in construction.”
But even as a kid, his son was always looking at buildings and trying to figure out if they could be built differently or better.
“I always re-imagined things,” he says.
After studying engineering at the University of Alberta, Beljan worked as a project manager for PCL. But he had an entrepreneurial streak, so after helping to build the new recreation centre in Spruce Grove, he bid on and won the contract to set up the centre’s food concession and lounge.
“I had no business starting a restaurant, but I just loved the fact of being an entrepreneur,” he says. “I had never spent a day in the kitchen. I had no idea what I was doing. It was a disaster, but what I learned from that, and more important than my education, was if you put your mind to something you figure it out.”
After a tough year learning cooking, pricing, hiring and managing staff, Beljan started to make a good profit.
He stayed at PCL eight years, then worked for WAM developers. In 2010, he and investor Ivan Jankovic started up Beljan Developments. They’re now up to 15 projects. A major one was the Lynnwood Centre, a 149th Street and 87 Avenue strip mall, which they fixed up and expanded by 20,000 square feet.
Beljan carved out a business by redoing older properties, partly because he had an affinity for these old buildings and also because there wasn’t much competition in this area, with most developers wanting to do new buildings.
“I think if the bones are good, if there’s history, if there’s story you can uncover in a building, those are special gifts that tenants and people just love,” he says.
On Whyte Avenue, he has eight projects completed or under construction.
PEDESTRIAN BUZZ
In Old Scona, Beljan has found the perfect place to build on what he loves most about any city: pedestrian activity at street level.
We’ve put cars first in Edmonton for too long and we’ve missed out on that street-level pedestrian buzz that good cities have, he says.
“That’s what Edmonton needs as a city more — and I think Whyte Ave. is a good core to build that. It has that already. It just needs a bit more reinvestment and more density to support that.”
In 2013, he went to work on the old Crawford Block just north of the Strathcona Hotel, adding a five-storey building with micro apartments in the back with alley-facing retail at ground level.
He got the idea for back-alley shops years earlier on his honeymoon in Melbourne, Australia, where he’d seen cool alleys with bars, restaurant and stores: “Their main strips were kind of OK, but their alley ways were just buzzing.”
The alley is a more intimate space for people, he says, and Whyte Avenue is the perfect place to move ahead with this idea.
“To me, that’s the definition of a vibrant city, when you have people at street level hustling and bustling. We have this real opportunity with the alley system to do this here because we have good anchors (on Whyte). It’s not like it’s this far-fetched, ‘Let’s do this and hope they come.’ It’s expanding what is already there.”
He’s now done two alley-facing shops off Whyte and plans to do more.
One other project that might make sense for Beljan is taking on the old Epcor power plant in Rossdale, where nothing is close to happening in the abandoned industrial plant at the very heart of our river valley and city.
Beljan makes it clear he’d be open to tackling this difficult but crucial project one day. If he can crack that power plan nut, he won’t just be Edmonton’s King of Back Alleys, he’ll be king of the city.