Drive past the Eastgate Boulevard exit off State Route 32 on a Saturday this August and you'll notice something odd. The parking lot at Eastgate Mall is fuller than it has any right to be for a building that's been bleeding tenants for years. Canopy tents run in rows toward the old Big Lots pad. A stretch of food trucks lines one edge of the lot. People are parking in spots that used to sit empty by 11 a.m.
None of that traffic is headed inside the mall. It's headed to the parking lot itself, which has quietly become a more reliable weekend destination than the building it surrounds. That's the part of the Eastgate story that hasn't made the news yet, even though the mall's decline has been covered by nearly every station in town. The building is stuck in litigation that won't fully sort itself out until 2030. The pavement around it didn't wait for permission.
The Number Everyone Skips Over: 2030
If you've followed the Eastgate coverage on the local news over the past two years, you've heard the word "redevelopment" a lot and seen very little of it. There's a reason for that, and it isn't inertia. It's ownership structure.
Eastgate Mall's roughly 100-acre site is split among 11 different property owners, a mix that includes Hull Property Group, an Augusta, Georgia-based firm that bought the mall in 2023, and Kroger, which purchased the former Sears building in 2021 with plans to build a Marketplace store there. Five of those owners hold veto power over major changes to the property under a reciprocal easement agreement that doesn't expire until 2030. Until then, any one of the five can block what the others want to do, which is exactly what's happened with the Sears site. Hull and Kroger have been in litigation over demolition and site design since late 2023, and it's still unresolved.
That single date, 2030, does more to explain the mall's frozen state than any master plan rendering ever will. Union Township hired a design firm back in 2023 to sketch out a mixed-use vision for the property, and those drawings are worth looking at if you're curious what the site could become. But a vision document doesn't override an ownership agreement, and the agreement runs for several more years.
The legal pressure has only compounded. In April 2026, RCC Eastgate Mall LLC, which owns the outparcel that used to house Big Lots, sued Hull Property Group in Clermont County Common Pleas Court, alleging the company let the mall's exterior, roof, and parking areas deteriorate rather than pay for repairs. Depending on which court filing you read, the estimated repair bill runs somewhere between $4 million and $5 million. Tenants inside the mall have described rent increases that more than doubled, a general manager who was let go, and a building that stopped decorating for the holidays or playing music over the speakers. Non-anchor vacancy at the mall climbed to roughly 59 percent as of last fall.
One retail analyst quoted in local coverage put it this way: the mall in its current form isn't built to survive, but the corner of State Route 32 and I-275 that it sits on is valuable enough that something will eventually take its place. That's a fair read. It's also a read that requires patience most weekend plans don't have.
The Same Owner Complaining About The Mall Also Fixed Its Parking Lot
Here's the detail that makes this more than a decline story. Jack Cary, who owns Furniture Connection and has been one of the more vocal tenants describing the mall's problems in local news coverage, didn't wait around for Hull or the courts to solve anything. He started his own outdoor market in the mall's parking lot.
It's called EastGate Vendors, and it runs both outdoors at 4555 Eastgate Boulevard and indoors inside the mall itself at 4601 Eastgate Boulevard. The lineup includes more than 70 vendors on a given weekend, small businesses and makers filling booths that range from $30 to $100 a day depending on placement, plus a Food Truck Row for anyone who just wants lunch. There's a booth reserved at no cost for local charities and fundraisers, and another set aside for young entrepreneurs trying out their first sales pitch.
The market has run every summer weekend through 2026, and the current schedule lists August 29 and 30 as Weekend 12, its last confirmed dates before fall programming gets announced. If you've been meaning to check it out, that weekend is the closest thing to a deadline this thing has.
The mall's own management hasn't disappeared from the picture entirely. Eastgate has kept running its Summer Kids Club with the Clermont County Library through the season, and the mall hosted sports card and memorabilia shows on August 15 and August 20 this year. Those events show a building that's still trying. But the market Cary built in the parking lot is the one that's actually pulling people off Beechmont Avenue and State Route 32 on a Saturday, and he built it without waiting for the litigation to clear.
Cherry Grove Isn't Waiting On The Mall Either
Zoom out a few minutes down Beechmont Avenue and the same pattern holds. Cherry Grove's retail identity doesn't run through Eastgate Mall's front doors, and it hasn't for a while.
Cherry Grove Plaza, anchored by Kroger and Target along with Chick-fil-A, ALDI, and T.J. Maxx, sits on its own footprint and draws its own weekday and weekend traffic regardless of what's happening a few miles east. Taziki's Mediterranean Cafe opened in the Cherry Grove Shopping Center in 2022 with a patio built around fire pits and garage-door walls that fold open to merge the outdoor seating with the dining room. The location has become a steady sponsor of Forest Hills school fundraisers and teacher luncheons, the kind of small, recurring community tie that doesn't show up in a market report but shapes how a place feels on a Tuesday afternoon.
Then there's Cherry Grove Lanes and its attached Setters Sand Volleyball facility on Hopper Hill Road, which claims the largest indoor and outdoor beach volleyball setup in the region with nine courts, a Tiki Bar, and 34 bowling lanes. Its Fall 1 2026 outdoor league season kicked off August 17 and runs through October 18, which means as of this week it's barely a game or two in. If you've thought about joining a league or just want to watch a Thursday night match with a beer in hand, you're not late.
None of these places needed Eastgate Mall to solve its ownership fight first. They built their own draw and kept it running.
Worth A Saturday Before Labor Day
The honest version of the Eastgate story isn't "the mall is dying," which you've already read elsewhere, or "the mall is coming back," which nobody can promise until 2030 at the earliest. It's that the parking lot figured out how to be useful again while the building above it stayed tangled in court dates. That's not a small thing for a neighborhood that's watched this property sit half empty for years. It's proof that the corridor around it doesn't actually depend on what Hull and Kroger decide to do with a 46-year-old shopping center.
If you want to see the vendor market in its current form, the weekend of August 29 and 30 is your best bet before the fall schedule resets. If you miss it, Setters' outdoor league still has weeks to go, and Cherry Grove Plaza and Taziki's aren't going anywhere either way.
I spend most of my time helping people buy and sell homes in this stretch of the east side, but the small stuff like this, who's running the parking lot market this month, which league just started, which shopping center actually anchors the neighborhood, is the stuff that tells you what a place is really like day to day. If you're curious what else is happening in Cherry Grove or want to talk through what your own corner of the market looks like, reach out to Lori Williams any time.
