Tampa school pays $12M for former Floriland Mall property

The Floriland Office Center, a well-known Tampa commercial property built as a mall in 1972, has been sold.

The buyer is the Tampa Bay Christian Academy, which will move its campus to the site, says the commercial real estate firm Franklin Street.

According to Hillsborough County property records, the school paid $12.8 million for the property. 

Franklin Street represented the seller, a Delaware LLC that bought it in 2015 for $14.76 million, and announced the deal. The Tampa firm will also manage the property for the school.

Tampa Bay Christian, the firm says, chose the site because it needed to find a space that could accommodate its current 600 students as well as amenities like a cafeteria, outdoor recreation space, offices and classrooms.

The new space will allow the school to increase enrollment when it moves from its current home on Rome Avenue in Seminole Heights about three miles away.

Tampa Bay Christian has begun moving into the space, but it’s “a gradual move,” a Franklin Street spokesperson says.

The purchase, says Franklin, required tax-exempt bond financing because the school operates as a nonprofit funded “substantially” by the state of Florida with no tuition paid out of pocket by families.

That financing structure carries its own set of requirements distinct from a typical real estate closing, the firm says.

According to its 2025 Form 990 posted on the nonprofit research company Candid GuideStar’s website, Tampa Bay Christian has $3.95 million in  assets.

The Floriland Office Center at 9039 Florida Ave. is just off Interstate 275 at Busch Boulevard. The 160,000-square-foot center first opened as a mall but facing stiff competition from newer centers around Tampa, it closed in 1990.

Over the years, it became an office complex. Today, it has eight existing nonprofit tenants that will share space with Tampa Bay Christian when the school finishes moving in.

The school, the building’s owner, is taking 96,000 square feet; Ultimate Medical Academy has about 25,560 square feet; and the remaining tenants take up about 38,440 square feet.

“This transaction is representative of two converging trends in Tampa’s commercial real estate landscape,” Anthony Suarez, associate director at Franklin Street, says in a statement. “Adaptive reuse of aging retail and office assets for educational and institutional purposes and the increasing difficulty of finding large-scale infill sites in the urban core (are) both prevalent within the region.”

Franklin Street’s Suarez and Pat Kelly represented the seller and Franklin Street Property Management will manage the facility for the school.