Photo by Solomon Crenshaw Jr.
Brian Krogsgard stands in front of the Weygand Surveyors building on Oxmoor Road. He plans to renovate the building for office use.
Brian Krogsgard had a plan all laid out.
The Edgewood resident had purchased the Weygand Surveyors building, located on Oxmoor Road in West Homewood. He had gotten approval from the Homewood City Council to turn the two-story office building into a mixed-use development that would feature a combination of retail and restaurant uses on the ground floor and office space on the second floor
Then, about six months after the council gave final approval of his plan, Krogsgard decided to pivot.
He purchased the Weygand Surveyors company, closing that deal in December 2023. The company’s operations have shifted to the smaller building he owns just east of the two-story Weygand building, which he plans to upgrade.
Krogsgard studies industrial engineering at Auburn University and admits he didn’t know the first thing about surveying until he needed surveys for his own home and other buildings.
“Really, my education about the business came from sharing the office and then honestly just digging in,” he said. “More than anything, I knew it was a part of the real estate transaction process and I knew the value that a survey could provide.”
Importantly, Krogsgard said he understood that Weygand Surveyors has a significant local presence, particularly in Jefferson and Shelby counties.
“It’s a business with a long-standing name that’s been around for 75 years,” he said. “The opportunity to kind of be the fourth generation, if you will, of that business moving forward was something I was really excited about. You’re not starting from zero; you’re starting with a tremendous amount of history behind you. You’re just shepherding it into the next generation.”
The name of the business won’t change, even though it is a different entity.
“From a customer perspective, it’s still Weygand,” Krogsgard said. “We still have all that history of information and market presence that was important to be maintained.”
Krogsgard said a viability pricing study was done over the course of a year for the redevelopment plan that the city had approved. Ultimately, he found that the project would be enormously over budget.
“After we got the city approval and we got the final construction numbers, things just didn’t line up appropriately,” he said. “I kind of had to rethink: What are we going to do here and what does that look like, and how do we continue to do a redevelopment, but within the bounds of reality from a pricing perspective and not get out over our skis?”
Those questions led Krogsgard back where he — or the building — started: as an office building.
“I had no desire to do something that didn’t make financial sense,” he said. “I have a strong desire to do something that I think is beneficial to the community locally and this area. One of the realizations that I came to is that it is an office building. As much as I would have loved to add to the fabric of the development activity in the neighborhood, to put in mixed-use entertainment, retail, things like that, there’s also an avenue to improve it as an office building and add to the local workforce with the building.”
The developer hopes to refurbish the larger building to house other offices.
“Within the budget that I do have, I can make it a nicer, much nicer office building,” he said. “We might be able to put 40, 50 people to work in that building, but then use all those other [neighborhood] resources — the coffee shop and the restaurants and the gym and salons and other things that are here. That’s kind of the angle that I’ve taken on.”
The work of refurbishing the Weygand building began recently, with a new roof.
“I’m taking it kind of one step at a time,” Krogsgard said. “Next is going to be working on that facade to pull it out of the 1980s.”
Behind that facade, he said, is a building that’s got “solid bones.”
“It just needs to be brought into the modern era, for the type of workplace that people want to be in every day,” the developer said. “That’s very possible with what I want to do.”
