Charter School Inks 56K-SF Lease in Retail Center Near Miami Suburb

Charter school network BridgePrep Academy will open another location, this time inside a shopping center in Miami-Dade County.

The school operator, which has 19 locations across Florida, signed a 56,000-square-foot lease at the open-air California Club Shopping Center in Ives Estates, near Aventura, 15 miles north of Downtown Miami.

The 273,050-square-foot property, owned by RK Centers, sits west of Interstate 95 at 750 Ives Dairy Road. Other tenants at California Club include Planet Fitness, Five Below and Burlington.

Waterways Preparatory Academy @ Kropp Annex, part of the public Dade County School District, previously leased BridgePrep’s new space up until at least last year.

“Miami doesn’t have a surplus of properties that work for educational operators,” CBRE’s Scott Goldstein, who represented the tenant alongside Keith Edelman, said in a statement. “We moved quickly.”

Some of the challenges include the lack of available properties that have the correct code and layout. Demand for grade schools, mostly for private ones, has skyrocketed in South Florida since the onset of the pandemic, when a slew of new-market companies opened offices and their employees moved in tow.

To fix the issue, billionaire developer Stephen Ross is donating $100 million to Pine Crest School, a private school with locations in Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton, to open another in West Palm Beach, Bloomberg reported.

Another billionaire, Jeff Greene, has spent $50 million to build The Greene School, also in West Palm Beach, the Wall Street Journal reported.