Most mornings before eight, the Don Soffer Exercise Trail already has its regulars. Walkers with earbuds in, a stroller or two, someone's dog straining at a six-foot leash toward the water fountain at the halfway bench. The 3.1-mile paved loop circles the Turnberry Isle Resort Golf Course along Country Club Drive, and locals rarely call it by its full name. It's just the Circle. Some of the reviews posted about it stretch back fifteen or twenty years, from people who've logged laps here since before some of the newer condo towers went up along the route.
What's changed isn't the loop itself. It's what sits against its northern edge, where the trail passes behind Aventura Mall. For most of the last decade that stretch was a dead patch of parking lot fronting a shuttered Sears and Kmart. Over the past year it has turned into an actual destination with a name, a tenant roster, and a Saturday morning market, and the family behind it is the same one whose name is stamped on the trail's own signage.
The Man the Trail Is Named For
Don Soffer built Aventura before there was an Aventura to build. He developed the condo towers, the golf course, and the mall that eventually became one of the busiest retail centers in the country, working the land between Miami and Fort Lauderdale that had mostly been marsh before he got to it. Aventura Mall's own news page notes that he passed away on July 20, 2025, and that his daughter Jackie Soffer, who now runs Turnberry Associates, still tells the story of him driving her to job sites on weekends when she was a kid.
That family connection matters here because it explains why the block next to his trail didn't just get leased out to whoever showed up first. It got bought outright.
$131 Million, Steps From the Finish Line
In December 2025, Turnberry and Simon Property Group, the same ownership group behind Aventura Mall, paid $131 million for the 219,000-square-foot open-air retail center next door, previously known as Esplanade Aventura. The property sits on 12.3 acres at 19505 Biscayne Boulevard, built in 2023 on the old Sears and Kmart footprint, and Commercial Observer reported that Bank of America financed the deal with a $101.8 million mortgage. The buyers renamed it The Abbey at Aventura almost immediately.
Harrison Soffer, Jackie's son and a Turnberry principal, put the intent plainly in the announcement:
"Consumers do more than shop, they connect, dine, discover, and experience."
That's the pitch. Whether it holds up is easier to judge by walking the place than reading the press release, so here's what's actually there.
What's Already There When You Finish Your Lap
The food side has filled in fast. STK Steakhouse anchors the dinner crowd. Sweetgreen and Pura Vida cover the health-forward lunch rush. North Italia, JOEY Aventura, Jarana, and Amalfi Llama round out a dinner lineup that ranges from Peruvian to Mediterranean-Italian. For the earlier part of the day, there's a Starbucks and The Salty, a donut counter, and Salt & Straw opened for dessert earlier this year.
The fitness and work side is just as built out. Anatomy Fitness opened its largest location to date here in January 2026, a 26,000-square-foot, two-floor club with an expanded dumbbell area and its own sports performance program, positioned to pull members from both Miami-Dade and Broward. Pure Barre and Tremble cover boutique studio classes, and Industrious runs a coworking space for anyone who wants to turn a post-run coffee into a half day of actual work without driving anywhere else.
None of that existed in this form eighteen months ago. It's the difference between a trail that deposits you back at your car and one that deposits you into an actual morning.
The Saturday Habit You Might Be Missing
If you only use the Circle on weekdays, there's a piece of this you've likely never seen. Every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., The Abbey runs a Collective Market along its open-air walkways, built around local vendors and small food stalls rather than the chain tenants that fill the rest of the week. It's the kind of thing that gets mentioned once in a press release and then just quietly becomes a fixture, easy to miss if your Saturday routine doesn't already route you past that side of the mall.
The Ring Road Bet
Turnberry has said publicly that more than 50,000 square feet of additional tenant space at The Abbey is still being built out, on top of what's already open. The family has also talked, in less formal terms, about wanting the ring road connecting Aventura Mall and The Abbey, a stretch called Abigail Road, to eventually function as a real shopping corridor rather than just a driveway between two parking structures. That's an ambition, not a finished product, and it's worth treating it that way for now. But it tells you the buildout isn't finished. Whatever's filled in by the time you read this is a snapshot, not the ceiling.
Same Family, Same Habit, More to It Now
There's something almost tidy about the fact that the trail circling the golf course still carries Don Soffer's name, and the block it borders just became his family's newest project. The habit hasn't changed. People still show up before the heat sets in, still do their laps past the same benches and the same water fountains that have been there for years. What's different is what waits at the end of it now: a full food lineup, a real gym, a coworking desk if you need one, and a Saturday market that turns a Tuesday routine into something worth planning a weekend around.
If you've lived in Aventura long enough to have a favorite bench on the Circle, this is worth a slower lap sometime this month, if only to see how much has actually landed since you last paid attention to that side of the loop.
Whenever a move, a sale, or a question about the market brings you back to thinking about Aventura in a different way, R&R Prestige Properties Group is here to help. Contact Us.
