The Retail Plaza Going Up Next to Middle Sound West Isn't the One New Hanover County Approved in 2024

Drive Market Street past the Middle Sound West apartments and you'll pass a stretch of cleared land that's been sitting there for more than two years. Anyone who's watched that corner for a while has probably noticed the site plan posted near the road has changed more than once. It has, and the shift tells you something about how hard it's gotten to find retail space in Ogden.

What Got Approved First

Back in May 2024, the project on the table for that 9.6-acre parcel at 7241 Market Street looked office-heavy. The plans submitted to New Hanover County called for two 12,000-square-foot, two-story buildings meant for a mix of retail and office use, plus a smaller 3,200-square-foot building set aside for a restaurant with outdoor seating. Total footprint: 27,200 square feet, accessed off Lendire Road with 70 parking spaces. The applicant was listed as Robert J. Hollis with Front 7241 Market Street LLC, and the plans went before the county's Technical Review Committee that June.

That version never got built.

What's Going Up Instead

By May 2026, the project had a new name, Middle Sound West Village Square, and a different shape entirely. Instead of two tall office-and-retail buildings, the current plan calls for five single-story retail buildings at 5,850 square feet each, with 6,000 square feet of outdoor plaza space woven between them. The buildings sit on about four acres of the original site. The owner-developer is now Tribute Companies, the Wilmington firm that already owns the 288-unit Middle Sound West apartment complex next door, with two LLCs managed by company president and CEO Mark Maynard Sr. listed on the paperwork.

The building count went up. The office component went away, at least for now. That's not a cosmetic redesign. It's a developer reading two years of leasing activity and deciding the market wanted something different than what got drawn up in 2024.

Why Retail Won Out

The project's representative, Steve Hall, put the reasoning plainly when the revised plans went before the county's Technical Review Committee in May 2026: the retail side was pulling in interest fast enough that it made sense to build it first and figure out the office piece later. He described demand coming from restaurants, fitness concepts, and medical office users, with a few leases already close to signed before the buildings were even permitted.

Hall also drew a comparison that's worth sitting with if you've lived in this part of Wilmington for a while. He likened the project's trajectory to Mayfaire's early years, when that development opened as almost entirely retail and let office space follow once the retail base was established. Ogden doesn't have a Mayfaire-scale center, but the logic is the same: put the businesses people will actually walk into first, then let the slower-moving office leases catch up.

According to Hall, the driver behind all of it is a straightforward supply problem. Ogden's retail inventory hasn't kept pace with how many people now live within a few minutes of Market Street, so a plaza with five ready-to-lease buildings answers a demand that's been building for longer than the empty lot suggests.

What This Means for the Corner You Already Drive Past

If you live off Middle Sound Loop Road, in Anchors Bend, or in one of the smaller pockets like Demarest Landing or Demarest Village, this stretch of Market Street is probably already part of your regular route, whether you're headed to Ogden Elementary, out toward the Intracoastal, or down toward Wrightsville Beach. The existing options nearby, places like Holiday Village and Ogden Town Center, haven't been enough to soak up the demand Hall described. That's the part that's easy to miss if you only glance at the site plan: this isn't a developer guessing at what the neighborhood wants. It's a developer responding to leases that were reportedly already lining up before ground broke.

None of the specific tenant names have been made public yet. What's confirmed is the category mix Hall pointed to: restaurant, fitness, and medical office users. For a neighborhood that's grown around boating and quiet residential streets rather than commercial corridors, that combination fills a gap that's existed for a while. Middle Sound Marina, at the far end of Middle Sound Loop Road, has boat slips and a protected basin but, by its own description, very few amenities on land. A five-building plaza a short drive away changes that equation for anyone who's been launching a boat and then driving somewhere else entirely for lunch.

What to Watch For

The May 2026 plans went before New Hanover County's Technical Review Committee, which is a procedural step, not a final approval. No construction timeline or opening date has been published. Given how much the project changed between 2024 and 2026, it's worth treating any single site plan as a snapshot rather than a promise. The building count, the tenant mix, even the office-versus-retail balance could shift again before anyone's cutting a ribbon.

What seems more durable is the underlying read on the neighborhood. A developer who already owns nearly 300 apartment units next door has a direct stake in getting the retail mix right, and the version of the plan that survived two years of revisions is the one built almost entirely around businesses people can walk to, not office tenants who might commute in from elsewhere. That's a different bet than the one made in 2024, and it's the one currently headed toward construction.

If you've been wondering why that lot on Market Street kept changing its story, that's the answer. It wasn't indecision. It was a developer waiting to see which version of the plan the neighborhood would actually fill.

If you're curious about how Middle Sound's day-to-day is changing and what that could mean down the road for property values or timing a move, The Jennifer Farmer Team keeps a close eye on corners like this one. Open Your Door on the Coast.