The Collin Creek Premium Doesn't Come With a Delivery Date

Five years after the ceremonial groundbreaking, Plano Magazine's own retrospective on the Collin Creek redevelopment landed on one sentence that matters more than anything else in the marketing materials: "no timelines have been announced for vertical retail or office construction." That assessment ran in April 2026. It is the number a buyer comparing homes near the old mall site in Central Plano actually needs before writing an offer.

Collin Creek gets sold as a live-work-play district rising from a dead 1980s mall. The "live" part is real and mostly finished. The "work" and "play" are still a rendering with no construction date attached. If you are pricing a home in the 75075 zip code partly on the assumption that a walkable retail and office district is arriving soon, you are pricing an asset whose second and third acts have no confirmed start.

What's Actually Standing There Right Now

The mall closed in 2019 and Centurion American broke ground on the $1 billion replacement on September 24, 2021. What exists on the ground today is almost entirely residential. Plano Magazine's April 2026 update put it plainly: five years in, the site amounts to a nearly finished single-family subdivision, with roughly 500 townhome lots delivered to three builders, Ashton Woods, DRB Homes, and Mattamy Homes. Those homes run 1,500 to 2,400 square feet and were priced around $470,000 as of that report, a figure confirmed separately by listings that showed Ashton Woods marketing three- and four-bedroom units starting near the same number.

The infrastructure underneath the houses is done. A 1,976-space parking garage finished in March 2025. The Chisholm Trail Extension, connecting the site to 15th Street, was on track for completion by the summer of 2026. What's newer is the parks: Community Impact reported in June 2026 that construction on two city-owned parks, Starlight Park and Sunrise Park, would begin that same quarter, years after the residential rollout started.

None of that is a criticism of pace for its own sake. It's a sequencing pattern, and the sequencing is the story.

The Part of the Plan That Hasn't Moved

Here's where the promise and the ground truth split. Centurion American's own project page describes a finished Collin Creek with somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 square feet of retail and dining, 1.3 to 1.5 million square feet of office space, a hotel, 300 independent living units, and 2,300 apartments. Connect CRE's February 2026 coverage noted the retail component was "advancing" and that 412 apartment units were still sitting in the permitting queue, waiting to be cleared before a shovel could move. Community Impact's June update pushed the multifamily groundbreaking to late third quarter or early fourth quarter of 2026, with a 22-month build after that.

Office and hotel construction don't appear in either report at all.

The retail square footage itself has drifted across public reports, quoted at 400,000 square feet at the 2021 groundbreaking and closer to 300,000 in the 2026 coverage. The office figure has moved too, between 1.3 and 1.5 million square feet depending on the year of the release. Plans for a project this size shift over time. What hasn't shifted is the absence of a poured foundation for either use.

Why the Order Makes Sense, and Why It Still Matters to a Buyer

There's a reason housing arrived first and the rest waited. Selling finished lots to national homebuilders is a transaction Centurion American can close today, with buyers who bring their own capital and demand that already exists. Speculative retail and office space needs signed tenants and construction financing lined up before the first beam goes up. One side of the ledger pays as it's built. The other side has to be pre-sold before it can start.

Plano Magazine's own comparison point is useful here. Legacy West, the mixed-use district that now anchors West Plano, went from planning in 2013 to opening in 2017, a four-year build-out. Collin Creek is well past that mark with its commercial core still unscheduled. The same piece also drew the less flattering comparison, to North Dallas's Valley View Mall, a redevelopment that has taken close to a decade to deliver on a similar promise.

None of this means Collin Creek won't eventually deliver its retail and office core. The parking garage, the parks now under construction, and the drainage infrastructure that Community Impact's Connie Delgado described as the project's biggest scheduling constraint all suggest continued investment rather than abandonment. What it means is that anyone buying near the site today on the assumption of an imminent walkable commercial district is pricing a timeline the developer has not published.

What This Means If You're Weighing Central Plano Against Legacy

West Plano's Legacy corridor already has its anchor tenant. AT&T consolidated thousands of employees onto the former EDS campus on Legacy Drive, and the retail around it, the Shops at Legacy and Legacy West, has been open and operating for years. A home purchase there is priced against amenities that exist.

A home purchase near Collin Creek in Central Plano is priced, in part, against amenities that are still a plan. That doesn't make the location worse. Plano ISD serves the development, the parks are moving forward, and the trail connection is close to done. It does mean the retail and office premium that some listings imply, the idea that you're buying into a finished live-work-play address, isn't something the public record supports yet. The honest way to evaluate a home near Collin Creek right now is as a residential purchase in a Plano ISD neighborhood with a genuinely uncertain commercial build-out attached, not as a discount entry into a finished district.

A Few Direct Answers

Is Collin Creek zoned for Plano ISD? Yes. Project materials for the site place it within Plano ISD boundaries.

What are the homes actually selling for? As of reporting in early to mid-2026, townhomes from the site's builders were listed starting in the high $400s, with at least one quick move-in unit priced just under $470,000.

Will the retail and office space eventually get built? No public source has an opening date for either. The retail component was described as advancing construction in February 2026, and the residential and park infrastructure keep moving forward, but neither the office towers nor the hotel have a reported groundbreaking as of mid-2026.

How does the pace compare to other Plano redevelopments? Legacy West took four years from planning to opening. Collin Creek passed that mark with its commercial core still unbuilt, a pace closer to the slower Valley View Mall redevelopment in North Dallas than to Legacy West's timeline.

If you're weighing a home near Collin Creek against something in West Plano or another part of the city, the comparison is worth having with someone who tracks these build-out timelines as closely as the price sheets. Niche Realty Group can walk you through what's actually finished at Collin Creek today, what's still on the drawing board, and how that should factor into what you're willing to pay for a home there right now.