If you have shopped at The Cheesecake Factory or grabbed a scoop at Amy's Ice Creams over the last few years and noticed the place felt a little worn around the edges, you were not imagining it. The planters looked tired. A storefront sat dark longer than it should have. The patios never quite got the update that a shopping center full of $200-plus dinners deserves. For most of that stretch, the reason had nothing to do with Great Hills itself and everything to do with who owned the building.
That changed on February 4, 2026, when Charlotte-based Asana Partners bought The Arboretum, the roughly 197,000-square-foot open-air center at the corner of Research Boulevard and Great Hills Trail, from a joint venture between Washington Prime Group and O'Connor Capital Partners. Washington Prime had held the property since 1998. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2021 and had spent the years since unloading pieces of its portfolio, including Lakeline Plaza, Lakeline Village and Wolf Ranch Town Center. A center can keep its anchor tenants and still stop getting reinvested in when its owner is working through bankruptcy court instead of a capital budget. That is roughly what happened here.
The tell was in the ownership, not the neighborhood
None of this shows up if you just drive past. The Arboretum still has The Cheesecake Factory, Amy's Ice Creams, Cava, Juliet Italian Kitchen, Pottery Barn, Soma, Ballard Designs, Chico's, Lovesac, Teapioca Lounge and Hanara Sushi & Grill, plus Barnes & Noble and the Renaissance Austin hotel that has anchored the property since it opened on September 10, 1986. The tenant roster reads like a healthy, aspirational center. What it does not tell you is that its landlord for the last several years was working through insolvency, which is a very different thing from a landlord choosing not to invest.
Asana Partners is not in bankruptcy. The firm's managing director of investments, Brad Kantrowitz, said the acquisition supports the company's strategy of owning "some of the best neighborhood retail in the country," calling North Austin an attractive target market. That is a bet on the demographics and the daily foot traffic Great Hills already generates, not a bet that the neighborhood needs to change. The distinction matters if you live here: the last several years of deferred upkeep were a landlord problem, not a Great Hills problem, and the fix is now underway rather than years off.
What actually changes, on what timeline
The renovation plan, covered by Community Impact in March 2026, is specific:
- Reconfigured common areas built to support live music, pop-up retail and community programming
- New patios for outdoor dining
- Improved connectivity across the property
- Replaced storefront signage throughout
Asana has described the goal as turning the center into an "18-hour retail destination," meaning a place with a reason to be there from morning coffee through a late dinner rather than just a dinner-and-leave stop. Site work is scheduled to begin this summer, so residents driving through this fall should expect to see some of it in progress, with completion targeted for early 2027. The current tenant mix is expected to stay largely intact through the work. This is a facelift on an occupied building, not a teardown.
If the name sounds redundant with the shopping strip directly across the street, that is because there are technically two separate Arboretum properties here, developed a couple of years apart under separate ownership. The Arboretum proper, the one Asana just bought, opened in 1985, developed by Trammell Crow and managed today by Simon. Its park spaces still have the five cow statues sculpted by Harold F. Clayton that regulars mention when they are trying to describe the place to someone who has never been. Arboretum Market, the smaller center across Great Hills Trail with Trader Joe's, is a separate 105,190-square-foot property that opened in 1987. Its own version of this story already played out: it lost its original anchor, Saks Fifth Avenue, when that store closed at the end of 2012, and Trader Joe's moved into the space in 2014. What is happening to The Arboretum now is not a new phenomenon in this stretch of Research Boulevard. It is the second time in a decade that an aging anchor property here has needed an owner willing to actually spend on it.
A reason to go before the construction fencing goes up
If you want to see the center before any of the work starts, there is a specific, dated reason to go this month. Truluck's Austin Arboretum is running its Austin Restaurant Weeks menu from August 28 through September 13, 2026, a three-course dinner for $75 a person. Ten dollars of every Restaurant Weeks meal goes to the Central Texas Food Bank, with an additional two dollars from each Voilà cocktail made with Tito's Handmade Vodka. It is a small, local, time-boxed detail, the kind that will not mean anything to you next spring, but it is the sort of thing worth building an evening around if you are already planning to be in the neighborhood before the sitework starts.
The other anchor, kept up a different way
Retail is only half of what makes Great Hills feel like Great Hills day to day. The other half is Great Hills Park, an 80-to-90-acre City of Austin neighborhood park tucked along Sierra Oaks and Floral Park Drive, and it has taken the opposite path to upkeep. There is no institutional buyer here, no capital partner betting on North Austin. The trail network, which connects the Sierra Oaks trailhead to the Floral Park trailhead and out to a smaller Foxway trailhead just off Penny Creek Drive, has been maintained for years by volunteers, with trail work led by a longtime park volunteer named Eric Potter. Bat houses have been placed along the main trail for hikers to spot as they cross the creeks that run through the park. After a heavy rain, a six-foot waterfall appears along the Foxway side trail near one of the park's more accessible springs, and a quiet spot known among regulars as the Fish Pool still holds bass, sunfish and the occasional snapping turtle if you approach it slowly.
That contrast is worth sitting with. One anchor in Great Hills just changed hands because its previous owner ran out of runway to keep investing in it. The other has stayed in good shape for decades because neighbors kept showing up to do the work themselves, with no landlord, bankrupt or otherwise, involved at all. Both are true descriptions of the same zip code in the same year, and neither one would tell you the full story without the other.
What this means if you live here
None of this changes what your street looks like or what your house is worth tomorrow morning. What it does mean is that the next twelve months in Great Hills will look different in a specific, visible way: construction activity around the retail core starting this fall, a slightly different Arboretum by early 2027, and a park a mile away that will look exactly the way it always has, because it was never anyone's balance sheet problem to begin with.
If you have been in Great Hills long enough to remember when The Arboretum still felt sharp, or you are new enough that you only know the version that has felt a little tired, either way you are watching the same fix happen for the first time in almost thirty years. CBSrealty has been tracking Great Hills and the rest of Northwest Austin since long before this ownership change, and if you ever want a read on what a renovation like this tends to do to a neighborhood's retail draw, or just want to talk through what you are seeing on your own drive to the grocery store, call Chet for a free home consultation.
