Drive down 146th Street past Clay Terrace this month and you will still see paper on the windows of the old Red Robin. If you live in Buckhorn or Buckhorn Estates, you have probably passed that corner a hundred times this year, on the way to Whole Foods or Dick's Sporting Goods or just cutting through to Michigan Road. For a while, that dark storefront looked like the kind of thing that makes a longtime resident nervous. A big, visible box sitting empty at the shopping center you use every week usually means something is wrong.
Here, it meant the opposite. The empty box wasn't decay. It was a landlord finishing a handoff before deciding what comes next.
A vacant storefront in a center that's 95 percent full
The strange part is the math. Clay Terrace is not a struggling property. Its new owner, Hines Global Income Trust, has publicly described the center as 95 percent leased, anchored by Whole Foods and Dick's Sporting Goods, with tenants like Sweetgreen, Sephora and Lululemon filling out the rest. Zoom out further and the picture gets sharper: Carmel's retail submarket has a vacancy rate of roughly 1.4 percent, compared to a 5.1 percent metro average, with no new retail supply currently under construction. That is not a market where landlords let good real estate sit dark by accident. Space that empty, for that long, in a center that full, usually means one thing: a lease is already signed and the paperwork is still catching up to the plywood.
That is exactly what happened here. The building didn't sit vacant because nobody wanted it. It sat vacant because the deal that would fill it was still working through Carmel's approval process while a new owner was busy taking over the whole property around it.
Who actually owns Clay Terrace now
If you've lived near Clay Terrace for more than a few years, you remember the on-again, off-again redevelopment talk under Washington Prime Group, the previous owner. Plans for a hotel, apartments and offices got announced back in 2020, stalled through the pandemic, and never really restarted. That uncertainty is part of why an empty restaurant box used to feel like a bad sign around here.
That chapter closed in December 2025. Hines Global Income Trust, a Houston-based investment firm, announced it had acquired Clay Terrace as part of a deal worth more than $350 million that also included a 451-unit apartment tower in Chicago. Carmel's Redevelopment Commission Director, Henry Mestetsky, told local reporters that Hines is well positioned to run the property's day-to-day retail operations while also planning for its next phase of growth, something he said the previous ownership structure struggled to do at the same time.
"There will be plenty of community conversations as this moves forward."
That was Mestetsky's read on what comes next, and it matters for Buckhorn residents specifically because Hines' purchase included a 14.4-acre parcel already entitled for future multifamily development. Nothing has been announced for that land yet, but it tells you the empty Red Robin box was never really the main event. It was the easiest, fastest-moving piece of a much bigger property that changed hands less than a year ago.
What's actually going into the Red Robin space
The fast-moving piece landed in early February. On February 3, 2026, the Carmel Plan Commission approved an amendment letting Hines convert the vacated building at 14599 Clay Terrace Boulevard into two new restaurants: Shake Shack and Cava. Both are opening their first Carmel locations there.
The plans, filed under Hines representative Jim Brennan with architect Dave Rausch of Lumenat Architects, keep the building's existing footprint, dumpster enclosure and parking untouched. What changes is the front. The old circular Red Robin entrance is being converted into a patio for Shake Shack, and both restaurants' entrances are being reoriented to face north, directly toward 146th Street, so they read clearly from the road instead of tucked into the parking lot the way the old layout sat.
Shake Shack already has locations in Fishers, Zionsville and downtown Indianapolis, so this isn't the chain's first swing through the area. Cava, on the other hand, hasn't had a presence in Carmel before. Neither company has said publicly when doors open, but with design approval already granted, the build-out is the part that's left, not the negotiating.
The calendar Buckhorn already knows how to use
While the restaurant build-out finishes, the rest of Clay Terrace is running its normal fall programming, and this is the part that actually shows up on a resident's weekend plans faster than any restaurant opening will.
Two dates worth putting on the calendar:
- Saturday, October 24, 2026, noon to 5 p.m. The October Spooktacular Hometown Vendor Market sets up on the Village Green between Java House and the rest of the center's main walkway, with local vendors selling seasonal goods.
- Boo 'n Brew, the center's long-running fall festival, returns for its 14th year this October, following last year's 13th annual event that ran from 2 to 6 p.m. and drew families for trick-or-treating along Clay Terrace Boulevard, a beer garden pouring from Upland, Bier Brewery, Grand Junction and Field Brewing, hayrides, a pumpkin patch and live music. Clay Terrace hasn't published this year's exact date yet, but the pattern for the past several years has consistently landed on a mid-to-late October Saturday afternoon, so it is worth watching their events page as the month gets closer.
None of this is new territory for Clay Terrace. What's different this year is that the center is running its usual fall calendar in the middle of an ownership transition, with a rezoning approval already in hand and a big undeveloped parcel sitting behind it. The festival crowd this October will be walking past a construction crew finishing two restaurants that didn't exist as tenants a year ago.
What this actually means if Clay Terrace is your backyard
For Buckhorn and Buckhorn Estates residents, none of this changes your Saturday routine in a dramatic way. You'll still park in the same lot, still walk past Whole Foods on the way to wherever you're going. What it changes is what that empty storefront was telling you, and it turns out the answer is a useful one to know: a vacant box at a fully leased, low-vacancy retail center in a growing submarket is not a symptom of trouble. It's usually a sign that a deal already happened and the buildout hasn't caught up yet.
The bigger question, the one nobody has answered publicly, is what happens to that 14.4-acre entitled parcel now that Hines owns it outright. Mestetsky's comment about "community conversations" moving forward suggests Carmel expects to hear something concrete from Hines sometime this year. If that happens, it will be the first real signal of what Clay Terrace looks like five years from now, not just this October.
For now, the practical version is simple. Two new restaurants are coming to a spot you already drive past constantly, the fall event lineup is running on its usual schedule, and the property underneath all of it just changed hands in a way that suggests more change is coming, not less. Worth knowing before you make plans for the 24th.
If you're weighing whether now is the right time to buy or sell near Clay Terrace, or you're simply curious what a fully leased retail center like this does to home values in Buckhorn and the surrounding West Carmel neighborhoods, the Wilson Team tracks these shifts as part of daily work in Hamilton County. Reach out anytime you want a straight read on what's happening around your street, not just around the shopping center.
