If you own at KaMilo, the Terrace, Mauna Lani Point, or Champion Ridge, the short walk or bike ride to Foodland Farms has been the same errand for a decade. The center around it has not. For most of that decade the storefronts thinned out, signage faded, and the place ran on two anchors and muscle memory. This year, that changes.
The interesting part is not that new owners showed up. It is who they think the customer is. Read the leasing plan closely and the target is not the visitor holding a room key at the Auberge. It is the resident holding a house key half a mile away.
What Actually Changed In March
BH Properties, a Los Angeles-based real estate investment firm, announced the acquisition of The Shops at Mauna Lani on March 18, 2026. The center sits on roughly six acres at 68-1330 Mauna Lani Drive, and it serves as the primary retail and dining destination for the surrounding Waikoloa Resort Area.
The condition the new ownership inherited was not subtle. Tommy Bahama CEO Doug Wood, whose restaurant has been the anchor since the center opened in 2005, called it a failed center for the last 10 years with nearly a 50 percent vacancy rate, and said the new California-based owners plan to aggressively fill the current 11 store vacancies. Part of the drag was structural. The property was mired in a receivership following the federal arrest of its previous owner for manipulating stock prices. A retail center cannot lease aggressively while a court is running it. That constraint is now gone.
CBRE is handling the re-leasing, and the merchandising thesis is worth reading in the operator's own words. Target uses for the center include chef-driven restaurants, lifestyle retailers, boutique fitness and wellness, as well as the best of Hawaii's local brands.
Notice what is not on that list. National mall brands. Souvenir shops. Trinket retail keyed to a two-week visitor. The pitch is aimed at someone who eats dinner here on a Tuesday.
The Anchors That Held The Line
Before talking about what is coming, it is worth naming what stayed. These are the tenants a resident already knows by first name:
- Tommy Bahama Restaurant & Bar, the original anchor from 2005, recently remodeled with a new bar and expanded outdoor seating
- Foodland Farms, the grocery bookend at the opposite end of the center
- Island Hopper Taproom for a beer and a menu that reads local
- Mauna Lani Coffee Company, open early
- Hawaiian Island Creations, the surf shop founded in 1971 by the Tsukayama brothers
- Knead & Bake and Juice 101 on the daytime side
- Moana Salon & Day Spa on the lower level
The center is bookended by established anchors Tommy Bahama Restaurant & Bar and Foodland Farms, and the walk between them is the natural spine of the property. If you have been picking up ahi at Foodland and detouring for a coffee on the way home, you have been using the center exactly how the new owners want it used.
Reading The Leasing Plan Like A Resident
The tell is in the operator's language. BH Properties president Jim Brooks said the team specializes in value-add assets, great real estate that simply needs a strategic merchandising plan and capital investment to unlock value for tenants, visitors, and the surrounding community. He put the surrounding community third in that sentence, but the leasing brief tells a different story. The center immediately services the luxury resorts and residences that surround The Shops at Mauna Lani, as well as the nearby Waikoloa Village.
Chef-driven restaurants and boutique fitness are not visitor products. Visitors eat at their hotel. Chef-driven restaurants get filled by people who live within a fifteen-minute drive and eat out twice a week. Boutique fitness gets filled by members who show up on Tuesday mornings. That is a resident merchandising thesis dressed in resort clothing.
The near-term improvements read the same way. BH Properties short-term plans include improving the common area by enhancing seating areas, landscaping and lighting throughout the center, and the new owners plan to capitalize on the pedestrian and bike-friendly nature of the center, which connects to the Mauna Lani resort about three-tenths of a mile away. Better lighting matters to someone walking home after dinner. It does not matter much to a hotel guest on a shuttle.
The Rhythm That Did Not Wait For A Reset
While the leasing plan works itself out, the resident calendar around Mauna Lani has kept its shape. Two touchpoints worth circling this month and next:
Twilight at the Eva Parker Woods Cottage. Twilight is a live music and storytelling event hosted at the Eva Parker Woods Cottage on the Saturday closest to the full moon, showcasing local performers in a community series that celebrates Kalāhuipua'a. The 2026 dates include August 29, September 26, October 24, November 21, and December 19. Bring your own chairs, blankets, and a picnic. The stage is the fishponds, Maui across the channel, and the coconut trees.
Free hula performances at the center itself, held on the covered center stage in the late afternoon. These have been part of the shopping center's weekly cadence for years and are the closest thing the property has to a public living room.
For golf residents, note the club-level shift up at the Auberge itself. The new Francis Brown Club at Mauna Lani, Auberge Resorts Collection, adds a paid upcharge to existing room categories. The upcharge runs about $350 per night on top of the base room rate for the same room category, with no change in square footage, lanai size, bathroom, or guaranteed view upgrade. This is the hotel, not the shopping center, but it is worth understanding as context. The resort is unbundling access as a paid tier at the same moment the retail center is being rebuilt around ambient access for people who already live inside the resort gates. Different strategies, same underlying pressure on what "resort access" is worth.
A Baseline For What Is Coming
Some short numbers to hold against future openings. The center is an open-air luxury shopping center at the entrance of Mauna Lani Auberge Resorts Collection with the potential for 34 stores. Eleven vacancies against a 34-store footprint is roughly a third of the property in play right now. That is a large enough share that the tenant mix a year from today will look meaningfully different from the tenant mix you walked past last Sunday.
CBRE's brief is chef-driven restaurants, lifestyle retailers, boutique fitness and wellness, and the best of Hawaii's local brands, with a stated intent to unveil a best-in-class merchandise mix aligned with the upscale and active lifestyle of Mauna Lani, thoughtfully designed as a destination for family gathering, shopping and eating. Read that against the current tenant list. A wellness studio, a second chef-driven dinner option, and one or two Hawaii-based lifestyle boutiques would completely change the after-five rhythm of the property without displacing a single existing tenant.
The signal to watch for is not a grand opening. It is the first time you notice a Tuesday night dinner reservation being hard to get somewhere that is not Tommy Bahama.
What This Means For Your Weekly Walk
If you already live at Mauna Lani, the practical implications are small and immediate. Expect construction fencing around common-area upgrades. Expect landscaping and lighting to be phased in through the year. Expect broker signage on the empty units to churn as leases are signed. And expect at least one restaurant announcement that reframes what a "quick dinner at the shops" feels like.
The larger point is quieter. For a long time the center was a place residents defended by explaining what it used to be. The reset is the first time in a decade the honest description points forward.
If you are considering a Mauna Lani purchase and want a read on how the reset factors into resale, or if you already own here and want to talk through what the tenant shift may do to walkable value at KaMilo, the Terrace, Mauna Lani Point, or Champion Ridge, Frank Schenk and Nicolaas Schenk are happy to have that conversation. Contact Us to start it.
Acquisition detail from BH Properties' March 18, 2026 announcement. Vacancy, tenant, and leasing detail from reporting by Big Island Now and CBRE Retail Services. Twilight dates from Mauna Lani, Auberge Resorts Collection. Room-tier detail from Beat of Hawaii, May 2026.
