One of Santa Monica’s quieter corners is about to get a lot louder at lunchtime.
Ocean Park Plaza, a mostly vacant two-story office and medical complex at 2701 Ocean Park Blvd, has been sold and is slated to be transformed into a co-educational school campus, according to industry brokers. The deal yanks a big chunk of underused office space off the market and is expected to inject some daytime energy into the Ocean Park corridor.
Who Bought It and What They’re Planning
Commercial brokerage firm Colliers arranged an all-cash sale of Ocean Park Plaza and says the buyer is an undisclosed co-ed school that plans to relocate its campus to the property, as reported by ConnectCRE. Colliers’ marketing team included Vice Chair Sean Fulp and local executives, while Tim Dornin and Scott Rigsby of Industry Partners and Dan Pickart of Newmark represented the buyer, the outlet notes.
What the School Is Getting
The complex itself is a roughly 100,700-square-foot, two-story office and medical building. Colliers’ offering materials show that about 73% of the space, or roughly 73,557 square feet, was available for immediate occupancy at the time of marketing. Brokers highlighted 11-foot ceilings, an interior courtyard and covered underground parking as features that make the property especially adaptable for nontraditional uses like a school.
Why Old Offices Keep Turning Into Something Else
The sale fits into a broader wave of adaptive reuse and owner-user deals across Greater Los Angeles, where the office sector is still carrying a heavy vacancy load. The region’s office vacancy rate was about 23.6% in the first quarter of 2026, according to the Los Angeles Times. In a market like that, selling to a community institution or other owner-user can be a quicker way for landlords to stabilize a property than trying to lease up floor after floor of empty space.
What It Could Mean for the Neighborhood
“The buyer gets a campus in the heart of the Westside, and the neighborhood gains an institution that adds real activity and stability,” Colliers’ Sean Fulp said, per ConnectCRE.
Turning an office building into a school will not be a plug-and-play job. The conversion will likely require standard plan review and fire-safety approvals. Santa Monica’s new self-certification building-permit program is designed to speed up some tenant improvements, but it expressly excludes childcare and education uses from self-certification, which means this project is expected to go through a full review process, according to the City of Santa Monica.
For now, the buyer has not publicly released a renovation schedule or a target opening date, leaving neighbors to watch and wait as the former office complex prepares for its second act as a school campus.
