One of Greensboro’s most accomplished real estate investors is putting money into something else expected to reap a healthy return — education centered on innovation and entrepreneurship.
Steve Bell, the founder of Greensboro-based Bell Partners, has with his wife Jackie made a historic $5 million donation to Greensboro Day School, the largest gift in the school’s 53-year history. The money represents seed funding for the Center for Student Life, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which Head of School Tracie Catlett had announced Sept. 21 as a priority in Greensboro Day School’s new campus master plan.
Bell is well known locally and nationally in real estate circles, having founded Steven. D. Bell & Co. in 1976 as a company specializing in multifamily housing. The company, rebranded as Bell Partners in 2009, today is one of the largest apartment investment and management companies in the United States, with 70,000 apartments under management and 1,600 employees across 12 different offices nationwide.
The center is envisioned as a central hub for programs in entrepreneurship, design and the arts, engineering, public purpose, and student wellness. In addition to entrepreneurial incubator spaces, the center will include an industrial makerspace to accommodate textile design, woodworking, soldering, 3D printing, and welding. Also planned are flexible, hands-on spaces allowing students to explore current and emerging technologies in robotics, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.
The Bells have long been supporters for education. They donated $11 million in May 2020 to the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill, from which Steve Bell graduated, and then increased that gift to $25 million the following October to support the school’s expansion.
“Jackie and Steve Bell have been tremendous supporters of and investors in education in North Carolina at the college and PK–12 levels,” Catlett noted. “Greensboro needs a strong public and private school system to support the economic growth that is happening now and to attract future growth in the Triad. This center will deepen the school’s connections within the community and ready our students for what’s next in business, technology, design, and innovation, and it will serve to strengthen the school’s commitment to academic excellence, public purpose, and adolescent wellbeing. The Bells’ historic gift has certainly created significant momentum for making this vision a reality.”
In announcing the gift, the Bells noted that 13 of their children and grandchildren have added Greensboro Day, including four currently enrolled.
“Greensboro Day School has been a very positive influence on the Bell family! The high quality and dedication of the faculty and staff will ensure a great learning and social environment for current and future Greensboro area students,” Steve Bell said in a statement. “Our gift will help create a new facility that will foster innovation and equip students with the skills they need to become leaders in the Triad and beyond.”
Added Chief Philanthropy Officer Dr. Ian Patrick: “The Bells know that having a top-flight independent school such as Greensboro Day School is essential to the city’s future economic development efforts, and I know that there are many parents or grandparents of GDS students or alumni that feel the same way. We will be calling on everyone in the GDS community to help make this exciting project a reality.”
The company Steve Bell founded is coming off a record investment year in 2021, when it closed about $4.8 billion of transactions. In February, the company closed its Bell Core Fund I, a $930 million pool of capital sourced from domestic and international institutional investors that is expected to be leveraged for about $1.8 billion in apartment properties across 14 markets in the U.S.
Bell Partners, where son Jon Bell is now executive chairman and son Durant Bell is executive Vice President of client services, is also a power in the Triad’s local multifamily sector. It ranks as the region’s fifth-largest apartment management company with more than 2,500 units across eight local communities.
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