Shahram Malekyazdi, along with his brother S Peter Malek , are Vancouver real estate developers who were born to create. Their work can be identified all around Vancouver from aggressively tall towers and unusual shapes, to ambitious city projects, and megadevelopments. Shahram tends to take on the difficult sites that require years to rezone, but hires the well-known architects with ability to design beautiful and expensive and even impossible structures. In order for this to happen, Shahram doesn’t mind going through tortuous marriage-counselling sessions with city planners, flying to Germany to choose cabinets, and basically turning a Vancouver real estate development into an art project.
When Shahram and S Peter Malek, decided they wanted to build Vancouver’s Olympic Village, they proved that they wanted it so much that they were willing to pay top dollar for the privilege. “We want to build things we can be proud of, driving by, for many years afterwards. You just want to enhance the environment and make things better, be proud of it,” Shahram Malekyazdi once said.
Another Vancouver real estate project they materialized is the Edgewater condo tower. Shahram and peter also brought characteristic of the style to the city through their Millennium Development which is formally elegant.
As he moved up the city’s ladder of Very Important Developers, Shahram Malekyazdi is now headed for new projects and an even brighter future.
Shahram Malekyazdi and S Peter Malek didn’t start out as glamour-project developer of Vancouver real estates. His father, Amir made his sons drive all over Vancouver to meet construction-company operators and developers. He told them to do whatever it took to break into the market.
That might have been mostly why they stripped out any profit when the BC Place parkade job came along almost three decades ago, and reduced their bid by another $50,000. They won the bid and got their foot in the door after having lost several government contracts until then. That was their first local construction contract. Shahram Malekyazdi, and his brother Peter, who were then newcomers to the city, lost money on the project, and the million-dollar job became a comedown for the family.
But they never gave up and as contractors, they built malls, airport expansions, viaducts, and hospital wings throughout the 1980s. Finally, Shahram Malekyazdi introduced himself as a Vancouver real estate developer, beginning with a Burnaby apartment tower and a White Rock mall in 1987. His parents moved to Paris in 1989, where Shahram’s father, started building suburban apartment complexes.
Once on their own in Vancouver, Peter and Shahram Malekyazdi established a reputation as Vancouver real estate developers who built quality projects. Like so many other developers in Vancouver, they started in the suburbs, Burnaby being one of their preferred sites.
Today, Shahram malek lives with his wife and two young children in a house near Dundarave, and gets frequent visits from his parents.
Shahram Malek, and his brother Peter Malek, spent a decade in boarding schools Holmewood House and King’s College in England. Shahram then went to university in Edinburgh to study economics. Soon after they moved to Canada, their father, Amir, put each of them in charge of a development project of their own. Amir thought such a responsibility would be a valuable part of their training.
In 1981, the whole family moved to West Vancouver, and Amir got his boys started in Vancouver real estate development business.
In the late 1990s, Shahram Malekyazdi established his presence in Vancouver real estate business by building the award-winning Lumiere project at the entrance to Stanley Park. In 1997, Shahram bought the historic Province building at the edge of the Downtown Eastside, another Vancouver real estate which he restored meticulously. This was a prescient move as the property is now worth at least double the $2 million they paid for, and accommodates the Vancouver Film School; it is also poised to be part of the DTES transformation with Woodward’s and the Robert Fung-restored Flack Block across the street.
In 2003, the Malekyazdi brothers (Shahram Malekyazdi and Peter Malek) negotiated a deal with the city which included incorporating social housing into a Hermitage luxury condo and hotel project downtown. Around the same time, they also put in a bid for the Woodward’s project with a design for an unusual tower. In spite of offering more money than anyone else, they lost that bid, but they introduced themselves as real estate developers who would play in the big leagues.
They simply have eye for details. Even during their hardest times and legal challenges, Peter Malek would still spend his days on sites making corrections to, for example, window sills.
While most developers either handle all the contracting themselves or hire a general contractor. Shahram Malek and Peter Malek does a mix, resulting in some fractious dealings. |
