Head of Real Estate

About Primer

Fixing our K-12 education system is a civilizationally-important problem. We believe that all of our problems — including the ones that dominate the headlines — are downstream of education.

We have a simple thesis on how to solve it: empower 1,000’s of educators to launch microschools in their communities.

We believe the historical tradeoff between price (tuition) and quality is a false dichotomy.

PrimerOS automates and eliminates much of the costs of traditional schools. Microschools have a structural advantage — asset-light real estate — which means much lower capex and opex. You put it together, and you get something that’s never existed before: a world-class education that’s accessible to normal American families and can rapidly scale.

What You’ll Do

In the abstract, our goal is to decrease the friction required to launch each new Primer microschool. We have thousands of teachers ready to launch, and it’s our job to pave the way for them. We define friction in three buckets: time, cost, and effort.

To launch 1,000’s of microschools in a year, we need a real estate engine that can efficiently deliver new spaces for our microschools. We’ve made great zero-to-one progress here, with 23 microschools across Florida and Arizona. We’re looking for a Real Estate Lead that can turn this into an engine that can scale nationwide.

You’ll own the entire real estate process for each new microschool: from the earliest conversations about new market expansion to delivering a fully-approved space ready for students on the first day of school. You’ll be accountable to delivering these spaces below budget and ahead of schedule, minimizing both opex and capex in our expansion to new markets. You can expect to lean into our current asset-light strategy – partnering with churches, libraries, and community centers – and finding new unlocks for other paths to scale.

You should be an expert in local approval processes – certificates of use, changes of use, health inspections, DERM approvals, and more – and be maniacal about shaving off hours and days of each step of the process.

You should be excellent at operating both deep in the weeds of each new school approval as well as ensuring we’re building the engine that can scale – executing at both the 5,000 foot view and the 20,000 foot view at the same time.

Responsibilities

• Work with the executive team to select new expansion markets for Primer.

• Identify, source, and secure new properties within those markets (or, even better, design campaigns to bring the ideal properties to us).

• Own the end-to-end process of negotiating and leasing each new property, getting the property ready for students, and navigating all approval processes (local fire, health, certificates of use, and Department of Education).

• Architecting the real estate engine that will allow us to eventually open 1,000’s of new microschools each year.
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience obtaining regulatory approval for local physical businesses, ideally in multiple municipalities.

• Experience identifying expansion opportunities – including both market-level analysis and property-level analysis.

• Work experience within a fast-growing startup is a plus.

If this sounds like you, fill out the application below with a bit about yourself and we’ll take it from there! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to email us at [email protected].