For close to three years, the brick building at 5400 Oleander Drive sat exactly as Hops Supply Co. left it in March 2023. Old signage still hung on the front. The lot grew over. Anyone who drives Oleander Drive on a regular basis watched the same boarded windows pass by for so long that the building stopped registering as a business at all. It became scenery.
Then, in January 2026, it reopened as The Sounder, a coastal-inspired restaurant from Grant Steadman, the founder and president of Flying Machine Brewing. What actually happened in between those two facts, the closing and the boarding, is the part of the story that explains almost everything else moving on this corridor right now. If you live in Forest Hills or South Oleander and you've started noticing "coming soon" signs, rezoning notices, or a headline about the next thing supposedly landing on this street, the Sounder building is the case study for how to read all of it correctly.
Three Years of Boarded Windows, One Deed That Mattered
Before Hops Supply Co., the same address was an Eddie Romanelli's. After Hops closed, Wawa spent time circling the property, going as far as identifying it as a potential convenience store site before pulling its rezoning application in April 2024. For most of that stretch, the building's ownership never changed hands. It stayed under the same holding company that had owned it since 2008, waiting for a tenant or a buyer who never quite closed.
What actually moved the needle wasn't a rezoning notice or a corporate real estate scouting report. It was Steadman buying the building outright in the spring of 2025. From there, the timeline compressed fast: months of renovation, a soft opening planned for that winter, and doors open by January 2026 with executive chef Jason Burrows running a menu built around locally sourced oysters and fish, including a cold-smoked tuna wrapped Wellington-style in phyllo and a marigold spaghetti dish named for the citrusy petals folded into the pasta. Steadman is also sourcing seafood from Salt Street Oyster Company, a farm near Topsail Beach he co-founded, which also supplies his Flying Machine Oyster Bar in Wrightsville Beach.
The lesson isn't about seafood. It's about timing. A building can sit through two failed tenant plans and a pulled corporate proposal for years, and then go from purchase to open doors in under ten months once an actual buyer with a name and a plan takes title. The gap between "someone is interested" and "someone bought it" is where most of the waiting happens.
Down the Street, City Ownership Isn't Moving Any Faster
Elsewhere on the corridor, the half-acre lot at 4910 Oleander Drive tells the opposite version of the same story. The City of Wilmington has owned this parcel since September 2022, buying it for $600,000 from Perry Investments Inc. It sits zoned Residential Office District, a designation written specifically for this stretch of Oleander between Pine Grove Drive and 51st Street, with a stated purpose of limiting the impact of redevelopment along the corridor.
As of the most recent public reporting on the site, no project had been announced for the lot at all. That's worth sitting with. This isn't a stalled private deal waiting on financing or permits. It's public land, already paid for, with no operator attached and no timeline in motion. Ownership by itself doesn't create momentum. Momentum comes from someone with a specific plan and their own money on the line, which is exactly what was missing here and exactly what The Sounder's building had once Steadman closed on it.
The Business That Already Knew the Address
Not every story on this corridor starts with a stranger buying in from outside. Janie Perry opened Vintage Marketplace on Oleander Drive back in 2013, originally sharing space with Lou's Flower World at 5128 Oleander. She spent the next nine years at 5441 Oleander before this year's move: relocating back to her original starting address, only this time leasing the entire 18,000 square feet that had sat vacant for about a year and a half.
The expansion is real. Perry is growing from 12 vendors to 40, adding a café for coffee and light refreshments, and building in space for workshops like wreath-making and mosaics. Vendor space has also been picked up by the owner of the longtime Wilmington shop A Proper Garden, along with the interior design business Urban Goods + Garden. It's the kind of move that only makes sense for someone who already understands the block from the inside, not someone reading a market report about it. That distinction matters when you're trying to guess which "opening soon" story is real: an operator returning to a specific address they've already occupied is a different bet than an LLC filing paperwork for a site it's never touched.
What's Approved, and What's Still Just Paper
Rezoning approval gets covered as news, but it isn't the same thing as construction. Here's where four current Oleander Drive projects actually stand, based on the most recent reporting available on each:
| Address | Proposed Project | Land or Rezoning Status | Status as Last Reported |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5601 Oleander | Family entertainment center (Strikes LLC, applicant for longtime owner Mona Black Enterprises LLC) | Rezoning to Regional Business Conditional District approved March 2025 | Site undeveloped as of spring 2025 |
| 6120 Oleander (Summerwalk) | Roughly 200 apartments plus commercial space | Rezoning approved in 2024 | Lot described as untouched as of April 2025 |
| 5321 Oleander | Tree House Recovery treatment facility, including a clinical building, gym, yoga studio, and group homes | Land purchased for $2.5 million in September 2024; site plans submitted to the city in December 2025 | In technical review as of January 2026 |
| 4910 Oleander | None announced | City-owned since September 2022 | Vacant, no proposed use |
The pattern holds across all four. The project furthest along, Tree House Recovery, is also the only one where the operator already closed on the land more than a year before submitting plans. The two rezoning approvals with no land purchase attached to a name, the entertainment center and the Summerwalk apartments, both remained visibly unbuilt more than a year after getting the green light from City Council. And the city's own lot, owned longest of all, has no plan attached whatsoever.
How to Read the Next Oleander Drive Headline
Next time a headline announces something new for this corridor, three quick checks tell you more than the press release does. Has the property actually changed hands, recorded in New Hanover County property records, or is it still sitting with the original owner while someone else files paperwork? Has money already gone into the land itself, the way Tree House Recovery closed on its parcel a full year before submitting plans? And is there a specific person's name attached to the project, the way Steadman's and Perry's are, rather than just an LLC waiting on financing or a market shift?
None of this is a guess about what should happen on Oleander Drive. It's a read on what already has, four different times, on the same stretch of road, inside about eighteen months. The corridor isn't moving all at once. It's moving in the places where someone already owns the dirt, and staying exactly the same everywhere else.
If you've been watching this stretch of road for years the way most Forest Hills and South Oleander residents have, that distinction is worth more than the next press release. And if you're ever curious what any of this means for a home nearby, or just want someone who actually tracks this corridor block by block, Thirty4 North Properties Group is always happy to talk it through. Contact us anytime.
