TurnDev

TurnDev is a development and project management firm based in Beachwood, Ohio, working as owner’s representative on commercial and mixed-use real estate projects. The firm manages complex adaptive reuse and historic rehabilitation work, where the delivery challenge sits as much in coordinating a layered capital stack as in the construction itself. TurnDev is project manager on the $218 million redevelopment of Erieview Tower in downtown Cleveland, a 1964 Harrison and Abramovitz office building being converted to a W Hotel, apartments and Class A office, financed largely through C-PACE, federal and Ohio historic tax credits and state transformational mixed-use development credits.

TurnDev states its own scale in two figures: 500 million dollars in total development valuation and more than five million square feet in development. It measures success differently, though, arguing that the bigger wins are human-scale, connection, quality of life and thriving neighbourhoods, and that placemaking happens one block, one building and one bold idea at a time through strategic planning, investment, collaboration and restoration.

The pipeline shows what that looks like in practice, and it is concentrated in Cleveland. The Vibe Apartments is set to rise in Ohio City on the site of the old Cleveland Vibrator plant. The firm has bought a 3.4-acre site in the Detroit Shoreway neighbourhood. The Port of Cleveland approved financing support for its Superior Arts District project. MGK’s Shooters Yacht Club, on the Flats waterfront, has been given the go-ahead. Singer Steel in Little Italy and the District Building sit alongside these in the published portfolio.

The common thread is adaptive reuse of industrial and mid-century building stock in neighbourhoods that already have identity but have lost their anchor use. That work is less about construction complexity than about assembling financing from sources that each carry their own compliance regime, which is why an owner’s representative with capital stack experience is worth more on these projects than on ground-up work.

The office is at 3900 Park East Drive, Suite 200, in Beachwood, Ohio.