Drive past the northeast corner of Hunt Highway and Gary Road this week and you'll see a full parking lot at Home Depot, a line at Freddy's, and at least two more building shells wrapped in construction fencing that have looked more or less the same since spring. If you've been watching this corner for a year, you already know the feeling: it seems permanently on the verge of being finished. It isn't. It's arriving in pieces, on different schedules, and at least one of those pieces has already missed its original target date.
That matters if you're the kind of resident who plans a Friday night around what's actually open rather than what a sign out front promises is "coming soon." Here's where the corner actually stands as of this week, and why the pieces are landing in the order they are.
What's Already Running
Before any of the current wave of retail news broke, three tenants were already operating on the site: The Home Depot, Panda Express, and Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers. These aren't part of the redevelopment story. They were there first, and the rest of the project has been built around them.
What Opens This Month
The two names most San Tan Valley residents have been asking about, HomeGoods and Marshalls, are both set to open on August 27, 2026. You can tell this date is solid rather than aspirational because of what's been happening in the meantime: a multi-week HomeGoods hiring event has been running daily at the Four Points by Sheraton near Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport since July 20, and it wraps tomorrow, August 11. Companies don't run three-week hiring drives for stores that might slip another quarter.
Ulta Beauty is also on the books for this month, though the tracker maintained by SanTanValley.com lists it more loosely as "August 2026" rather than a fixed date. If you've been waiting on a specific errand run to line up with an opening, HomeGoods and Marshalls are the safer bet to plan around right now.
The One That's Running Late
Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers, the Arizona burger chain redeveloping the corner's recently closed Denny's location, was originally expected to open in late 2025 or early 2026, according to the announcement covered by SanTanValley.com when the deal was first made public. That window has come and gone. As of this week, the same project tracker that nailed the HomeGoods date down to the day still lists Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers simply as "Opens 2026," with no firmer date attached.
That gap isn't an accident of reporting. HomeGoods and Marshalls are junior-anchor tenants moving into shell space that was built to their specifications as part of the original site plan. Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers is redeveloping an existing restaurant building from the ground up, which means permitting, demolition or renovation work, and a construction timeline that doesn't move at the same pace as a big-box shell that was already framed and waiting for a tenant to sign.
The Long Wait
Two more names on the corner are worth knowing about, but not worth building your fall around. EOS Fitness is targeting September 2026, a month out from where things stand today. Chick-fil-A is the furthest out of anyone, with a summer 2027 opening, which puts it roughly two years after the $10 million land sale that set this whole project in motion.
Why the Order Isn't Random
The land itself has a specific history that explains a lot of this pacing. WinCo Foods originally bought a larger parcel here in 2023, kept 10 acres for its own store, and sold the remaining 31 acres in 2025 for $10 million to a partnership between Scottsdale-based Pennant Development and Nashville-based REALM, LP, with SRS Real Estate Partners handling the leasing. Even the total size of what's being built here isn't fully settled: one report pegs the eventual retail footprint at 165,500 square feet, while another puts it above 225,000. That's not a rounding error, it's a sign that leases are still being finalized and the final shape of the center is still moving.
What isn't in dispute is why national chains are willing to build here at all. The developer's own leasing materials point to nearby master-planned communities that give the intersection its customer base without residents needing to drive far: Santan Heights alone accounts for more than 5,200 units, Encanterra adds nearly 3,000 more, and the Skyline Ranch community itself contributes over 1,600. A Walmart directly across the street reportedly ranks among the top 10 in the Phoenix metro by customer count. That's the kind of rooftop density that gets a HomeGoods approved fast and a ground-up restaurant build queued up behind it.
What This Means for Your Weekly Routine
If you've been treating Hunt Highway and Gary Road as one project with one grand opening, it's worth resetting that expectation. This corner is going to keep changing in visible stages through at least the summer of 2027. A few practical things follow from that:
- HomeGoods and Marshalls are the most reliable bet for a specific date right now: August 27, 2026.
- Ulta should be usable sometime this month, but check before you build an evening around it.
- Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers has already slipped its original window once, so treat any date you hear for it as soft until the doors actually open.
- EOS Fitness and Chick-fil-A are both far enough out that they belong on a mental list for later this year and next, not this month's plans.
None of this is unusual for a retail corridor this size. What's useful is knowing which piece of the puzzle you're actually looking at the next time you drive past that construction fence, instead of assuming the whole thing is stalled just because the sign you wanted to see isn't lit up yet.
If you're a longtime San Tan Valley resident and you've watched this corner change shape over the past year, you've also watched the area's day-to-day convenience change with it. Fewer trips to Queen Creek or Chandler for a gym membership or a home goods run adds up over time, even if it doesn't show up on a listing sheet. For residents thinking about how corridors like this one shape day-to-day life in San Tan Valley, or for anyone weighing a future move in the East Valley, Mark Palacio has been tracking how growth on the ground translates into real decisions for buyers and sellers across Greater Phoenix. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what a corner like this actually means for your neighborhood.
