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Jon Veard owns his share of buildings on Broadway, the International City’s main business hub.

On a recent afternoon in a second-floor office in City Center, 300 Broadway, which he owns, sitting behind a huge desk crowded with papers he lamented his inability to secure the most basic of construction materials.

This failure has slowed work on condominiums he’s building on Beavercrest Drive.

It’s also stalled work on the building at the corner of West Fourth Street and Broadway, when renovated, will serve as the location for Papasitos Mexican Cantina 4th Street Diner.

“We should be done with several projects,” Veard said. “We can’t get materials and supplies in.

“We had to wait three months just to get the pipe to run the gas lines (at the Fourth Street location). The electrician couldn’t get the wire to run the wiring. We couldn’t get steel studs to put the steel studding in there.

“We should have been done with that job on May 30, and here we are in August and he’s hoping to get it done by the end of August.”

The situation was the same with the aforementioned condos, which officially are known as The Residence on the Green.

“We were supposed to be done by June 30 no later,” Veard said. “(We’ll) be lucky to be done by the middle of September.

“We’ve got eight or nine sold, people ready to move, can’t move them in because they aren’t done. We couldn’t get drywall, we couldn’t get insulation, we couldn’t get wiring.”

Veard’s United Property Management company just completed the renovation of the former Chase Bank building at 1949 Broadway, which now is home to the Lorain County Community Action Agency’s Head Start Program.

In total, Veard controls 25 properties on or near Broadway that he has redeveloped or has plans to redevelop in the near future.

That’s just the most recent project, though.

In the early 2000s, he transformed the burned-out Duane Building, 401 Broadway, into a viable mixed-use building that features office space, a basement restaurant and apartments.

“I think it’s been appreciated,” Veard said of the work he’d done in helping the Broadway area get turned around. “We’ve got a long way to go, but we’re on the way.

“More and more people are gaining confidence to do things in Lorain. I haven’t done it all. There have been others.”

Veard raves about the restaurant Union Town Provisions, which operates out of 422 Broadway.

“You look out during the daytime, they’ve got people piled out front,” he said.

Veard’s future plans are massive for downtown Lorain as he hopes to build on the momentum of Broadway’s revitalization that has appeared to kick into a higher gear this year.

Veard said he has plans to start work shortly on the stretch of Broadway that runs from 436 to 448 Broadway that includes the older Honecker Building.

That plan calls for renovating four storefronts and creating 16 apartments for the upper floors of the buildings.

“We almost have the drawings done for that,” Veard said. “We’ll start that in the fall.

“I’ve got names of people who want the storefronts.”

Veard said possible tenants for those properties are an Irish pub and an Italian restaurant.

In addition, he owns property on West Sixth and West Seventh Street where he plans to build up-scale market-rate apartments.

And there is property at the corner of West Ninth Street and Broadway where he plans to build another eight apartments and eight garages.

In addition, Veard owns the Spectrum Learning Center, a charter school that operates out of three separate company-owned buildings, including 300 Broadway.

The owner of the school fell ill recently and she told Veard he should buy it.

“She thought I was the logical buyer,” he said.

Veard ended up bringing in partner to run the academic side of the operation, and now he finds himself in the education business.

Veard was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth and is self-made.

A 1959 graduate of Elyria High School, he served a four-year stint in the U.S. Navy.

After graduating, his father, a longtime union auto worker, forbid his son from following in his footsteps.

Veard found work selling small loans for Public Finance Company.

He quickly worked his way up to office manager and the office’s profits soared along with his rise up the office ladder.

When he took over, the office ranked 1,368 out of company’s 1,600 offices nationwide for profitability.

“Within two or three years, I was top profit-maker in Ohio and top 10 in the country,” Veard recalled.

So what was his superpower?

The ability to quickly read people, he said.

“The one gift God has given me is the ability to size people up and read their character pretty rapidly,” Veard said. “That’s served me well over the years.

“I’ve always surrounded myself with good people, and I’ve been able to make the right choices.”

But Veard said he knew the business he was working in was not going to last.

At that time, finance companies specialized in loans of between $50 and $2,000.

They targeted the working class who relied on them to get them through tough financial stretches as credit cards had not yet come to being.

Veard said his strength was getting the people he loaned to get them to pay the money back.

Veard said word got out of his prowess when it came to collecting money and a group of local landlords called on his service.

“They came to me and said you can collect payments, but we can’t collect the rents,” he said. “Can you collect the rents?

“I said sure, what will you pay me.”

They agreed on a rate: Veard would earn $2 on every $100 of rent he collected.

Soon, he was making making more on a Saturday collecting rents than he was at the finance company.

That led to a conversation with his wife, Joy, whom he wed 59 years ago.

Veard said he told her he believed he could make more collecting rents than working at the finance company.

“I want to start my own rent collection business and quit the finance company,” he told her. “You just have to trust me.”

From collecting rents, he went to doing small apartment repairs such as fixing stoves, broken windows and locks.

He started another company that did that type of work.

Soon, Veard found himself managing apartments.

“Three years after I quit the finance company, I was managing 3,000 apartments,” he said.

His work was noticed by Harry Tomlinson, a higher-up with what was then known as Farmers Home Administration, a defunct government agency that financed businesses, housing and facilities in rural areas.

Tomlinson tried to convince Veard to build apartments in West Virginia rather than managing them.

Veard said Tomlinson told him to find a piece of ground to build 40 apartments and Tomlinson would “walk him through the rest.”

That apartment project ended up winning an award and Veard ended up building 40 projects before the government ended the project.

Veard, who started United Property Management in 1970, didn’t start developing in Lorain until 1987.

His first project was the Antlers apartment building which has a ballroom.

At the time, developers from the country were telling city officials it would cost upward of $15 million to rehab the building.

Veard said he scoffed at the numbers.

“I told my wife you could take that building down, put all the bricks in wheelbarrows and walk them around the block and put the building back up for,” for way less the $15 million, he said.

“She said ‘you’re such a smarty pants, why don’t you do it,” Veard said.

He walked the building with a pencil and legal pad.

“I calculated it had 50,000 square feet and It would take just under $2 million,” to renovate, Veard said.

With the help of the city, he was able to raise the money and complete the work.

He did not endear himself to the unions in the process, though.

Veard said a union bid to do the construction came in $600,000 higher than a nonunion bid.

He went with the nonunion bid.

It was a decision that would extract a price.

Union workers who delivered materials and picked up the garbage associated with the project did not make things easy, Veard said.

They allowed trash on the site to grow to mountainous heights, deliveries would be left across the street, some even in different cities, he recalled.

“They delivered my elevator to Toledo,” Veard said. “They delivered the wood to the park across the street.

“We had to use wheelbarrows to bring it back over.”

The project ended up with $400,000 in cost overruns.

Veard said he was able to offset that loss with the money he was making on his government contracts.

“We got it done,” he said. “We survived.”

Veard said it took him 13 years to break even on the deal.

“I lost money for 13 years, and now, I own it free and clear,” he said.

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