West Palm Beach's $6.6M Pine Crest Land Deal Beats Its Own Appraisal

West Palm Beach commissioners voted unanimously on July 20 to approve terms selling 57 acres of city-owned land along Roebuck Road, near Florida’s Turnpike, to Pine Crest School for $6.6 million, clearing the way for the private school’s third South Florida campus and its largest. The number that jumps out, $115,789 an acre, invites an obvious question for anyone who tracks municipal land deals: is the city giving land away. The record says otherwise.

Why it matters

For developers who watch how cities price surplus land, this deal is a useful data point precisely because it looks cheap and is not, once site conditions are priced in. The parcel’s own 2026 appraisal came in at $5.7 million, or about $100,000 an acre, after the appraiser knocked $12.3 million off an initial $18 million civic-use estimate to account for roughly $7.5 million in de-muck costs across 36 of the 57 acres. Pine Crest is paying $900,000, about 16 percent, above that appraised figure. The land was not undervalued. It carried a real remediation cost, and the buyer still paid a premium to the number the city’s own appraiser produced.

The numbers

The deal covers 57 acres, with 55 deed-restricted to pre-K-12 educational use only and the remaining two carved out for an access road, according to Palm Beach Post reporting on the July 20 vote. Two earlier appraisals had landed $5.8 million apart, at $9.5 million and $3.7 million, before the city ordered the 2026 appraisal that set the $5.7 million baseline. Pine Crest’s existing campuses in Fort Lauderdale, at 48 acres, and Boca Raton, at 28 acres, are both smaller than the West Palm Beach site. Sale proceeds are earmarked for Roosevelt Elementary School’s academic programs. Commissioners still must approve a final sale agreement before the transaction closes.

What’s next

The Real Deal and other outlets tie the campus to Palm Beach billionaire Stephen Ross, describing a donation supporting the project. The Palm Beach Post reports it the same way, without specifying whether Ross’s involvement runs through Related Ross, a personal gift, or a school trusteeship, and that mechanism is not documented in the public record we could find. This is a separate matter from the unrelated Related Ross story on 209 N Sapodilla Street. Watch for the final sale agreement and any site plan filing, since the 55-acre educational deed restriction is the real constraint on what gets built here, not the purchase price. More South Florida coverage.