The Shops at Mauna Lani Finally Have a Landlord Who Wants You There

Drive past the Shops at Mauna Lani on a Tuesday evening and you can still see the gaps. A storefront with brown paper over the glass. Another with a "For Lease" sign that has been there long enough to fade in the sun. For most of the past decade, that has been the honest state of the retail center at the entrance to Mauna Lani, Auberge Collection and the Fairmont Orchid, a place with room for 34 stores that has spent years running at roughly half that.

The story locals tell about why usually stops at "it never really took off." That's not quite right, and the real reason matters if you live nearby and want to know whether this is finally going to change.

The center didn't fail. Its owner did.

The Shops at Mauna Lani opened in 2005 with Tommy Bahama as its anchor restaurant, a role the brand still holds today. For years afterward the center changed hands and changed hands again, eventually landing with Phoenix-based ArciTerra, run by an investor named Jonathan Larmore, who bought it from the family of the previous owner, Bill Borkan, after Borkan died in 2013. Larmore paid a little over $27 million for it.

What happened next wasn't a slow bleed of tenants deciding Kohala Coast retail wasn't worth the rent. It was a federal case. Larmore was sentenced to five years in prison in March 2025 for manipulating the stock price of WeWork in 2023, shortly before he filed for bankruptcy. The Shops at Mauna Lani went into receivership while that played out, which is a polite way of saying the property sat in legal limbo with no owner in a position to sign a new lease, fund a renovation, or make a long-term bet on the center's future. Tommy Bahama's CEO, Doug Wood, put it plainly when a local reporter asked him about it: the center had been "a failed center for the last 10 years" with vacancy near 50 percent, even though his own restaurant kept doing well the whole time.

That's the detail most drive-by accounts miss. The empty storefronts along Mauna Lani Drive were never really a verdict on demand. They were the visible symptom of an owner who couldn't operate the property at all.

What actually changed this year

On February 12, 2026, Los Angeles-based BH Properties paid $9 million for the ground lease on the center. Three and a half weeks later, on March 9, the same firm paid $17 million for the six acres of land underneath it, a combined $26 million to take clean control of both pieces. BH Properties has spent more than three decades buying underperforming commercial real estate across the western United States and rebuilding it, and it brought in CBRE to run leasing almost immediately.

The plan CBRE has laid out publicly is not a cosmetic refresh. It includes new landscaping, wayfinding and lighting throughout the common areas, and a leasing push aimed specifically at chef-driven restaurants, boutique fitness and wellness concepts, and Hawaii's own local brands rather than another round of generic national retail. Jim Brooks, BH Properties' president, described the center as a property with "significant untapped leasing potential." Kelly Graf, the CBRE associate overseeing the leasing effort, has talked about wanting tenants who will "activate the center" on lease terms that actually let a small business grow there, rather than the kind of one-size-fits-all national lease that pushed local shops out in the past.

The tenants already there give a sense of who's staying and why. Tommy Bahama extended its lease during the receivership for at least 10 years, with an option for 20, a bet Wood made before he'd even met the new owners. Foodland Farms remains the other anchor. Around them sit a handful of local operators that made it through the lean years: Island Hopper Taproom, Mauna Lani Coffee Company, Hawaiian Island Creations, Juice 101, and Knead & Bake Pizza. As of this spring, about 11 spaces sat vacant, out of a center built to hold roughly three times that many tenants. That's the gap CBRE is now actively trying to close, and it's worth watching which names fill it over the next year, since the target list of chef-driven restaurants and wellness concepts is a real departure from the mall-brand mix the center leaned on in its first decade.

What's already on the calendar

You don't need to wait for new leases to sign to notice the difference. The center has kept a community event calendar running even through the ownership uncertainty, and it's worth putting directly on your fridge if you live in Mauna Lani, Waikoloa Village, or anywhere along this stretch of the Kohala Coast.

• Sunset Jams, every second and fourth Wednesday, 5 to 7 p.m., on the center's main stage, with a beer garden run by Island Hopper Taproom. It's free, it's local musicians, and it's become the closest thing the center has to a regular resident gathering rather than a visitor pass-through.
• The Mauna Lani Culinary Classic, returning for its second year, runs four days from August 29 through September 1, 2026, at the Mauna Lani Beach Club and CanoeHouse. It's a partnership between Blue Ribbon Restaurants and Māla'ai, the culinary garden program at Waimea Middle School, and this year's roster includes James Beard-recognized chefs like Nancy Silverton, Sheldon Simeon, Jonathan Waxman, Andrew Zimmern, and CanoeHouse's own Pauline Lam. Some of it is priced for a splurge night out, but there's a kamaʻāina rate on the beachside event, and the closing Sunday morning session is a family-friendly malasada and mocktail workshop that costs less than a casual dinner out.

Neither of these events depends on the leasing turnaround finishing. But they're a signal of the same shift: this stretch of the resort is being treated as somewhere people live and gather regularly, not just somewhere visitors drive through on the way to the beach.

Why this is worth paying attention to now

The honest version of this story isn't that the Shops at Mauna Lani are suddenly thriving. Eleven empty storefronts don't fill themselves in a few months, and CBRE's own marketing still lists available restaurant shells and inline retail space for lease. What changed is something more structural than a fresh coat of paint: for the first time in a decade, the entity that owns this property has both the legal ability and the financial incentive to make it work as a neighborhood center rather than as an asset stuck in someone else's bankruptcy filing.

Doug Wood, only half joking, said the bare minimum move to help the place would be landing a Starbucks. Whether that happens or not, the direction CBRE has described, chef-driven restaurants and boutique wellness rather than another wave of interchangeable retail, suggests the center is being rebuilt with a resident's Tuesday evening in mind, not just a visitor's one-time stop between the airport and the hotel.

If you've been driving past those empty storefronts for years assuming this was just how the center was going to stay, this year is the first real evidence otherwise. Watch which names take the remaining spaces, and in the meantime, the fourth Wednesday of this month is as good a night as any to grab a seat at Sunset Jams and see the shift for yourself.

If you're curious about what else is changing around Mauna Lani, from the resort's trails to its longer-term market patterns, Deborah Thompson keeps a close eye on this stretch of the Kohala Coast and is always glad to talk through what she's seeing on the ground. Let's connect.