He’s routinely described as Alberta’s largest industrial developer, and if you ask him why, Randy Remington will reply coyly: “My weight.”

It’s a pretty good line, but it’s off target. Tall and soft-spoken, the chairman of Calgary-based Remington Development Corp. recently shed 20 pounds, is in fighting trim shape and expects the company to log revenue of $70 million for 2002.

That’s serious money, particularly for an outfit that employs only 16.5 full-time staff. But the return’s nowhere near as robust as 2000, the year the eight-year-old private company’s revenue topped out at $130 million.

Perhaps surprisingly, Remington’s suburban industrial market has slipped into under-drive at a time when residential builders are going full throttle (12,900 Calgary housing starts projected for 2002).

David Lazarowych, Business Edge
It took more than 10 years for Randy Remington to convince eastern Canadian companies to build western networks.

So, how does an “overnight success” such as Remington Development Corp. demonstrate its versatility when things soften up in its specialized field, namely the development of small, mid-size and large industrial warehouses?

“In our type of business, you have to be entrepreneurial,” said Remington, who owns 65 per cent of the company.

Translation: get creative.

It means thinking on your feet and turning on a dime, something at which Remington and his two partners (Larry Mason and Helmut Ebinger) are skilled.

It means branching into land development: servicing raw industrial land, nursing it through the zoning process, then merchandising it to new buyers without so much as putting up an outhouse.

It means buying 40 acres between Heritage Drive and Glenmore Trail S.E., servicing the land, selling half the property to Costco, then developing and retaining the remainder for lease to furniture outlets and fast-food chains.

Fact is, after incorporating Philadon Development Corp. in the late ’70s, Remington developed one of Calgary’s first, and hottest, big-box outlets: the original Costco on 11th Street S.E.

It was the mid-1980s and his competitors sneered.

“Everybody told us we were crazy, that they were gonna go broke,” he recalled. Backers were wary, too. Remington scraped up his financing a nickel at a time.

Today it’s the second-busiest Costco in the country. But, apart from such isolated triumphs, Remington struggled throughout the flat 1980s, an era of stalled energy projects and high interest rates.

It’s why he winces when he hears the words “overnight success,” and why he calls it the toughest 10 years of his career.

“There just weren’t any clients around. You wanted to do business but there was no demand,” he said.

To survive, Philadon took contract jobs in Vancouver and Toronto, and somehow managed to keep the wolves from the door. “We kept all our (financial) commitments, but it was tough,” he remembered.

“One of our lenders did business with 33 Alberta companies at that time. Only two didn’t go out of business or into receivership, and we were one of them.”

All the while, Remington tried to sweet-talk eastern Canadian-based food and furniture companies into setting up new distribution networks in the wide-open West.

“It took almost 10 years to get those companies to buy in,” he said, with the first eastern companies finally moving into Philadon-developed warehouse space in 1990.

In retrospect, the move was a no-brainer. Calgary’s a made-to-order distribution centre, offering abundant room for growth, reasonable trucking back-haul rates, and good highway and rail access.

Though things were looking up, Remington sold his stake in Philadon in 1993. And he played it cool after incorporating Remington Development the following year.

“I didn’t get a piece of land until seven months after I incorporated,” he said. “But as soon as we started marketing that land, the demand was obvious. Things kind of mushroomed from there.”

Today, Remington, who maintains an Edmonton office but does most of his work in Calgary, estimates he has developed as many as nine million square feet in the city.

He and his partners have taken few wrong turns, writing off only $8,000 in bad guesses since ’94.

Naturally, Remington is used to taking potshots from residents whenever he puts a building on a vacant lot. But since the company developed and leased 475,000 sq. ft. on Portland Street in Ramsay, he has a ready answer for critics.

“We found hundreds of needles on one site, discarded by drug users,” said Remington, who bought the land before the mess was discovered. It meant a costly, tedious cleanup.

It was a clear-cut case of a developer enhancing the environment, as well as a good lesson for the partners. Now the environmental testing is done BEFORE they buy the land.