If you shop at Village at Sandhill often enough, you've probably wondered about the four buildings sitting behind chain-link fencing near the center of the property. They're not under construction. They're not being renovated. They've just been sitting there, empty, for what feels like years, while the parking lots around them fill up with cars headed to Belk or Regal Sandhill or whatever new restaurant just opened in the strip near Two Notch Road.
The easy read is that this is decline. A big shopping center with dead space in the middle of it, the kind of thing that makes you assume the whole place is on its way down. That read is wrong, and the actual story is more interesting: those buildings are empty because two parties have spent nearly two years fighting in court over who gets to decide what replaces them. Nobody fights that hard over land nobody wants.
Four Buildings, One Long-Running Dispute
The buildings in question are known as the Promenade at Sandhill, built in 2006 as luxury condominiums in the heart of the shopping district. They didn't stay condos for long. Over the following years the complex rebranded to apartments, and the property picked up a history of lawsuits and complaints about construction quality along the way.
In 2020, a Florida-based company called North Bay Properties bought the buildings for $300,000, a price that only makes sense if you understand the buildings weren't valued for what was inside them. North Bay's plan was to tear them down and build something new in their place, apartments, townhomes, and additional retail space. Over the next four years, residents and the ground-floor retail tenants who remained moved out, and the buildings emptied.
That's when the fight started. In October 2024, the Village At Sandhill Property Owners Association, known as VASPAO, sued North Bay and its subsidiary over the demolition plans. The group's argument rested on a 2003 agreement tied to the original development of the shopping center, which required 30 days' written notice and property owner approval before any major changes to the complex, including tearing down a building. VASPAO said North Bay skipped that step.
The Sale That's Supposed to Settle Everything
By the fall of 2025, the dispute had a proposed ending. Court filings from late October showed the Promenade buildings were under contract to be sold, with a deadline of on or before December 1, 2025. Both sides agreed that if the sale closed, they'd drop the lawsuit. The buyer's identity was never made public, and neither was what they planned to do with the property once they owned it.
The case was formally dismissed on March 13, 2026, with North Bay agreeing to give VASPAO 30 days' notice before filing for any future demolition permits. That sounds like resolution, but a follow-up check of county tax records two weeks later showed no sale had actually gone through. As of late March 2026, the buildings were still sitting behind the fence, still owned by North Bay, with the identity and intentions of the supposed buyer as unclear as ever.
That's worth sitting with for a second. The lawsuit ended, but the underlying question, what actually happens to that land, is still open. If you're the kind of person who walks past those buildings twice a week on your way into Marshalls or the movie theater, that's the honest update: nothing visible has changed, and nothing is likely to change quickly.
Why Empty Doesn't Mean Failing
Here's the part that reframes the whole thing. Back in 2024, a senior broker at NAI Columbia, one of the firms involved in developing the shopping center, put it plainly in comments about the broader property: Sandhill is, by most measures, one of the fastest-growing retail submarkets in the entire Columbia metro area. The vacancy that had opened up in the couple of years before that, he said, actually created an opening for smaller local businesses to get in at lower rents before the bigger, more recognizable names came back in behind them. Hair studios, indoor playgrounds for kids, new restaurants, all of it was filling in around the edges of the property even while the Promenade buildings stayed dark.
That tracks with what's happening just up the road. In June 2026, the city of Columbia issued construction permits for a new Royal Farms convenience store at 446 Clemson Road, at the intersection with Earth Road. It's the chain's first location in the Columbia area, following its first South Carolina store, which opened in Myrtle Beach in May 2026. Royal Farms operates nearly 300 locations across a half-dozen East Coast states, and companies that size don't plant a flag in a market unless the traffic counts and rooftop growth justify it. The stretch of Clemson Road where the new store is going has added hundreds of new homes and dozens of new businesses over the past few years, part of the same growth that's kept Village at Sandhill's overall footprint expanding even as one corner of it sat vacant.
Village at Sandhill has actually done this before. The center opened in 2004, and its anchor lineup has turned over more than once since, JCPenney arrived in 2005, Home Depot in 2006, Belk in 2007, Sam's Club in 2016, Burlington in 2018. A shopping center that's been rebuilding pieces of itself for two decades isn't the same thing as one that's dying. The Promenade situation is just the most visible version of that pattern right now, a stalled piece in the middle of a property that keeps adding pieces around it.
What Actually Changes Next
If you're waiting for a dramatic before-and-after at the center of Village at Sandhill, you'll probably be waiting a while longer. The realistic version of what happens next looks like this: either the sale that both sides agreed to eventually closes and a new owner announces plans, or it falls through and North Bay is back to square one on demolition, this time with a 30-day notice requirement hanging over any future attempt. Richland County property records are public, and anyone curious enough can check whether a deed transfer for the Promenade parcels has actually recorded. As of the most recent reporting, it hadn't.
What you can count on in the meantime is that the rest of the property keeps moving. New tenants keep signing leases in the spaces around the fenced-off buildings, and the surrounding Clemson Road corridor keeps adding rooftops and businesses at a pace that makes a Royal Farms confident enough to build there. The fence around four empty buildings tells you a legal fight is unresolved. It doesn't tell you the neighborhood around it is standing still.
If you're weighing what a stretch of Northeast Columbia like this actually means for your own plans, whether that's a first home, a move from out of state, or figuring out what your current place is worth in a market that's still adding this much new activity, that's exactly the kind of read Hannah Norman spends her time on. You can browse more on the Northeast Columbia neighborhood page, or reach out directly. Let's connect, get your free home valuation, and talk through what's actually happening on the ground here.
