Ride the path along McCormick Parkway past the water and you'll pass an office building that has sat there since 1978, glass doors facing the lake, parking lot facing the path. For most of five decades, that's been the arrangement: the lake as a backdrop for a business park, visible if you happened to glance sideways from your bike. You couldn't get a seat near it. You could only ride, walk, or golf past it.
That building is Forever Corporate Plaza, and this year it's coming down in stages to become something residents have never quite had in this exact spot: a place to sit at a table with the water in front of you instead of a parking lot.
It isn't the only project doing this. Two separate developments are converging on the same stretch of McCormick Ranch shoreline within roughly a year of each other, and together they say something specific about this neighborhood that a decade of "lakes and golf" marketing copy never quite captured: the water here has spent fifty years as scenery, not destination. That's the part that's changing now.
A Half-Century of Water You Could See but Not Reach
McCormick Ranch's ten lakes trace back to Anne McCormick's Arabian horse stables, where the ponds that watered her breeding operation were reshaped into the lakes that give the community its shape today. Four of the ten are stocked with bass, bluegill, and catfish, and if you want to fish them, you need a permit from the McCormick Ranch Property Owners' Association and a catch-and-release policy in mind, not a cooler.
That's a neighborhood built around water for recreation and for view: golf fairways that hug the shoreline, more than 25 miles of paths that trace the lakes and greenbelts, homes with private docks. What it hasn't had, until this year, is water you could eat next to. The neighborhood's own long history explains why the lakes exist. It doesn't explain why nobody built a restaurant on one of them for fifty years. The simplest answer is that the highest-value lakefront parcel in the community was tied up as a corporate headquarters, occupied by the same tenant, for almost thirty years. Nothing changes at the water's edge while the water's edge is somebody's office lease.
Two Developers Are Racing to Put a Table on the Water
That lease finally ended. Diversified Partners, the Scottsdale-based development and brokerage firm led by CEO Walt Brown Jr., closed on the Forever Corporate Plaza site at 7501 E. McCormick Parkway and is converting the roughly 100,000-square-foot property into a project called The Lakefront at Scottsdale, designed with what Brown has described as a "modern Santa Barbara" aesthetic. At almost the same time, a second project is taking shape nearby: the former Chart House restaurant site is being rebuilt into a 12,000- to 14,000-square-foot steakhouse under Prime Steak Concepts, targeting a mid-2027 opening.
Here's how the two compare on paper:
| The Lakefront at Scottsdale | Former Chart House site | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 7501 E. McCormick Parkway | McCormick Ranch lake corridor |
| Developer | Diversified Partners | Prime Steak Concepts |
| Scope | Four waterfront restaurants (5,400 to 10,400 sq. ft. each), boutique retail, Class A office space, small marina with Duffy boat rentals | Single steakhouse |
| Site history | Former Forever Corporate Plaza, built 1978, occupied by Forever Living Products for nearly 30 years | Former Chart House restaurant |
| Timeline | Phase one (restaurants and retail) begins Q3 2026; phase two (office and remaining retail) begins early 2027 | Targeting a June 2027 opening |
Diversified Partners plans three of the four restaurant spaces with patios between 3,000 and 4,000 square feet, plus a small marina with Duffy boat rentals, the kind of amenity that only makes sense once you accept the lake itself is the point, not the parking lot's backdrop. Demolition and renovation on the restaurant and retail portion is targeted for the third quarter of 2026, the same quarter you're reading this in, not some distant future year pinned to a rendering.
What's Already Open While the Water Waits
The appetite for this stretch of Scottsdale showed up before the shoreline construction did. Starfish Scottsdale opened May 5 at 8390 E. Via de Ventura, the California-based hospitality group's first location outside its home state, with a 70-plus-item menu of Asian shareables that includes a lobster macadamia roll and Thai curry chicken, plus a daily happy hour from 3 to 6 p.m. A few blocks over, BLU Seafood, a coastal Mexican seafood concept known for green shrimp aquachile and fish tacos, took over the former OBON Sushi space at 7300 N. Via Paseo Del Sur as one of the notable May 2026 restaurant openings tracked by Phoenix magazine.
Neither of these sits directly on a lake. Both sit close enough that they read as a preview: restaurant groups are already betting on this specific corridor of McCormick Ranch before the water itself has a single restaurant seat facing it. That's worth sitting with for a second. The demand arrived first. The waterfront supply is catching up.
Why the Demographics Made This the Moment
Developers don't guess at this. Within a three-mile radius of the Forever Corporate Plaza site, more than 56,000 residents carry an average household income exceeding $205,000, a figure developers cited directly in their own filings as the reason the site pencils out for upscale dining and retail rather than another office renewal. That's not a broad Scottsdale statistic. It's a tight ring drawn around this specific lake, and it's the kind of number that explains timing better than any design rendering does. The income was always there. What wasn't there, until the office lease expired, was an available parcel with water frontage to build against it.
The Greenbelt Isn't Waiting on Construction Crews
None of this requires patience if what you're after is simply more reasons to be outside this year. McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park, the 30-acre city park anchoring the south end of the neighborhood, has kept a full summer calendar running regardless of what's happening at the shoreline. Slide the Rails brought a splash-pad morning to the park on August 1, and on July 17 the park marked 75 years of Scottsdale history with a splash-pad celebration featuring DJ Transl8r, foam cannons, and giant bubbles for a crowd that skewed toward families cooling off rather than train enthusiasts. The park's Sunday evening concert series has become enough of a fixture that Best of American Towns has singled it out as one of the state's better outdoor live music settings, without ever needing a lake view to draw a crowd.
That's the other side of this story. The neighborhood doesn't need the shoreline construction to already be worth the walk. The Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt, the 11-mile linear park that threads from Shea Boulevard through the middle of Scottsdale and eventually connects to Tempe Town Lake, runs directly through McCormick Ranch's own path system, so a Sunday morning ride can start at your driveway and end up well outside the neighborhood without ever touching a road.
What to Watch Through 2027
The next twelve months are where this actually gets tested. Diversified Partners has its first phase of demolition and construction targeted for the third quarter of 2026, meaning the shell of the first waterfront restaurant spaces should start taking visible shape before the year is out, with a second phase covering the remaining office and retail buildout beginning in early 2027. The steakhouse project at the former Chart House site is aiming for a June 2027 debut. Tenant announcements for the four Lakefront restaurant spaces haven't been made public yet, which means the specific names that will eventually fill those patios are still an open question worth watching for.
What's already clear is the shape of the change. A lake that has spent fifty years as the view from an office parking lot is becoming, piece by piece, a place people actually walk to for dinner. That's not a small shift for a neighborhood that has always had the water. It just never quite had a reason to sit next to it.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of McCormick Ranch might be worth as the shoreline fills in, or you're simply curious how a project like this tends to move property values in a lake-facing community, the Matheson Real Estate Team has spent years tracking exactly this kind of shift across North Scottsdale's water and golf communities. Request a Private Consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
