The Valley Bank Corner Filed Real Plans in March. The 850-Unit Tower Next to It Still Hasn't.

Drive the intersection of Dr. Phillips Boulevard and West Sand Lake Road on any given week and you will pass two pieces of paper taped to windows and bumpers that tell you nothing about which one is real. A faded "Stop Kimco Save DP" sticker on a car in the Publix lot. A rendering of a Mediterranean-style building pinned near the old Valley Bank drive-thru, the kind developers post when they want a neighborhood to get used to a shape before it exists. Both have been part of the visual noise on this corner for years. Only one of them corresponds to an actual filing sitting in an Orange County planning folder right now.

That distinction matters more than either sticker or rendering suggests, and it is the piece most casual updates on this stretch of Restaurant Row leave out.

Two Projects, One Intersection, Very Different Paper Trails

On the northwest corner sits the former Valley Bank building, a two-story branch that has occupied that parcel since 1984. Unicorp National Developments, run by Chuck Whittall, has owned the land since 2002. What started in 2023 as a roughly $30 million plan for three high-end restaurants and a parking garage has grown into something bigger: in late March 2026, an entity called Marketplace Center LLC, tied to Unicorp, filed formal plans with Orange County for a four-story, mixed-use commercial center spanning close to 30,000 square feet, with an internal four-level parking garage, on the 1.6-acre site. Reporting on the filing put the current price tag near $90 million. The company is asking the county for eight separate waivers covering open space, building height, landscape buffers, and setbacks.

That filing is not the project's first draft. After a 2023 community meeting where residents objected to a taller, more modern design, Whittall's team dropped a level of structured parking and swapped the look for a Mediterranean style, a change confirmed by Orlando Business Journal reporting at the time. In other words, the Pinnacle, as the project is now called, has already been through one round of public pushback, one redesign, and one formal county submission. There is a folder number attached to it.

Across the street, the Marketplace at Dr. Phillips, the Publix-anchored shopping center that has anchored this corner since the 1980s, tells a different story. In April 2022, Kimco Realty, the New York-based REIT that owns the center, filed a pre-application package with Orange County outlining seven conceptual layouts for the shopping center's west side, ranging from 418 to as many as 879 apartment units across buildings as tall as eight stories. The plans called for demolishing the vacant Stein Mart building, and in some versions, HomeGoods and Office Depot as well.

Residents organized fast. The "Stop Kimco Save DP" Facebook group drew close to 900 members. A Change.org petition titled "Stop 800 Apartments at Dr. Phillips Marketplace" collected more than 5,000 signatures. At the height of that pushback in 2022, Kimco itself tried to draw a line between the headline number and what it had actually asked for, telling Fox 35: "No formal plans have been filed for this master plan, nor for the construction of 800 residential units." The company said its immediate ask covered only a quarter to a third of that figure, tied to the Stein Mart parcel alone.

That distinction, drawn by Kimco's own spokesperson four years ago, is the one that keeps getting lost.

What Happened to the 850 Number

Nothing did, according to Orange County. A county planning department spokesperson told GrowthSpotter in May 2024 that the county had received nothing further from Kimco since that original April 2022 pre-application package, more than two years earlier. That same reporting confirmed the apartment concept was "currently off the table" and noted something more telling than any statement: the long-vacant former Stein Mart building, the one that would have been torn down for the first phase of apartments, had just been listed for lease as retail space for the first time in three years.

A landlord does not put a building back on the leasing market if it still plans to demolish it for a residential tower within the next construction cycle. That leasing listing is a more reliable signal than any press quote, and it points the same direction as the county's own filing record: the Marketplace apartment concept has been dormant since spring 2022.

Yet the 850-unit figure has kept circulating through 2026 write-ups about this intersection, sometimes described as a project still "under community review," without the caveat that no application has moved since that first pre-application four years ago. The number is easy to repeat because it is dramatic and because it once came from Kimco itself, in a 2022 master-plan document that the company later said covered a 10-to-20-year horizon, not an active proposal. A hypothetical drawn up in one meeting became, through repetition, something that reads like an active threat in another.

What Has Actually Changed on the Ground

While one project sat dormant and the other moved through redesign and filing, the food side of Restaurant Row kept turning over on its own schedule, independent of either fight. Delmonico's Italian Steakhouse opened in the former Romano's Macaroni Grill space following a buildout reported at roughly $5 million. Sixty Vines took over the former Roy's location at Plaza Venezia, bringing its wine-on-tap format to a spot that had sat through a few different concepts over the years.

Neither of those openings required a rezoning, a waiver, or a community meeting. They are the part of the corridor that changes constantly and mostly without controversy, which is worth separating from the two bigger fights. Restaurants come and go inside existing retail footprints. What residents have organized against, twice now, in 2022 and again around the 2023 Pinnacle redesign, are changes to the shape of the buildings themselves and what they might bring in traffic and density.

What to Actually Watch

For the Pinnacle, the next real signal will be an Orange County public notice tied to the 7625 W. Sand Lake Road parcel, since the eight requested waivers mean staff review and likely at least one more public comment period before permits could be issued. That is the point in the process where height, parking, and traffic circulation get settled, and it is the moment residents have influenced outcomes before, not after.

For the Marketplace, there is currently nothing to track, because there is currently nothing filed. The shopping center's zoning remains commercial, and any revived apartment concept would need a fresh rezoning application and its own public hearing process before construction could move forward. If that happens, it will show up in county records well before a shovel goes into the ground, the same way the 2022 pre-application did.

The corner is not static. One project on it is moving through a formal, documented process with a name, an address, and a set of waivers attached. The other is a set of renderings and a leasing listing that together tell a fairly clear story about which way the last four years actually went.

Dr. Phillips changes in increments most residents catch only when a familiar building disappears or a new sign goes up. Following the difference between a filed plan and a shelved one is the closest thing to a reliable way to stay ahead of it.

For those tracking how this corner, or any other in Central Florida's luxury and waterfront markets, is shaping value and lifestyle over time, Going Luxury Group keeps a close watch on the filings, not just the renderings. Contact Us to talk through what's actually moving in your neighborhood.