Walk or bike the greenbelt path along McCormick Parkway near Scottsdale Road this month and you will notice the fencing first. The building behind it, a low office tower that has sat at the water's edge for decades, is no longer just an office building. Diversified Partners, the Scottsdale firm that closed on the property in June, is weeks from breaking ground on a full conversion of the site into restaurants, retail and a marina. Three restaurant tenants were named for the first time in the past few days. A second, unrelated dining project is rising nearby with a very different playbook. For a stretch of shoreline that has had almost no upscale sit-down dining since a longtime waterfront restaurant closed last year, two separate developers have now placed competing bets on the same three-quarter mile of lake at nearly the same moment.
That timing is the part worth understanding, because it changes what "new restaurant on the lake" actually means for anyone who already walks this path.
The Building You've Walked Past For Years
The site at 7501 E. McCormick Parkway has been known to most residents as Forever Corporate Plaza, roughly 100,000 square feet of office space where Forever Living Products has operated its headquarters for close to three decades. It sits directly on the lake, with unobstructed views toward Camelback Mountain, which made it an odd fit for pure office use even before Diversified Partners came calling. The firm's CEO, Walt Brown Jr., has described the acquisition as an opportunity to create "a true destination in Scottsdale," and the plans back that up: the office component stays, with suites ranging from under 1,000 square feet to full-floor space, but the water-facing south and west sides of the property are being handed over entirely to restaurants and a pedestrian promenade.
Forever Living Products is staying on as a tenant through the transition, which means the building's original anchor does not disappear so much as get boxed into a smaller footprint while the shoreline around it gets rebuilt.
What's Actually Going In
The project, called The Lakefront at Scottsdale, was originally planned around four waterfront restaurant spaces. As of this month, three concepts have been named publicly for the first time:
- La La Land Kind Cafe
- V Modern Italian
- SUSHISAMBA
Restaurant footprints in the plans range from roughly 5,400 to 10,400 square feet, with patios on several of them large enough to seat well past a standard sit-down crowd. The retail side is smaller and more day-to-day: boutique storefronts between 1,200 and 5,500 square feet, aimed at the kind of jewelry, salon, med spa and wellness tenants that keep a shoreline active outside of dinner hours rather than only at 7 p.m.
Two details separate this from a standard restaurant announcement. The first is Forever Lane, a dedicated valet arrival drive built into the site design, which suggests the developer is planning for the kind of evening traffic a strip of retail with parking out front usually doesn't need to plan for. The second is a small marina with Duffy boat rentals, an amenity that turns the lake itself into part of the dining experience rather than just scenery next to it. Diversified Partners has also said it intends to relocate its own Scottsdale headquarters into the office portion of the building once construction wraps, doubling its current footprint.
Why the Timeline Slipped
If you remember hearing about this project back in the spring and assumed it had already broken ground, you're not wrong to be confused. Early reporting on the deal, sourced to the Phoenix Business Journal, pointed to a June 2026 groundbreaking. That date lined up with when Diversified Partners actually closed on the property, not when construction started. The firm spent the summer moving from purchase to permitting, and the actual groundbreaking ceremony is landing this month, roughly three months behind the original target. The three restaurant tenants surfaced through a media advisory just days before that ceremony, which is standard practice for a project trying to build momentum ahead of the photo op.
None of that is unusual for a project of this size. It is worth knowing, though, if you're trying to gauge how long the visible construction phase will actually run. A summer closing followed by a September groundbreaking means the demolition and site work most residents will see from the path is only now beginning, not wrapping up.
The Second Project Racing It to the Water
The Lakefront at Scottsdale is not the only new build on this stretch of lake. Nearby, Prime Steak Concepts is rebuilding on the footprint of the old Chart House, which had anchored this part of the shoreline since 1984 before closing last year. That project is smaller in scope but larger in square footage per restaurant: a single 12,000 to 14,000 square foot steakhouse, currently targeting a June 2027 opening.
The contrast between the two projects tells you something about how developers are reading this market. Diversified Partners is betting on variety, spreading multiple concepts and price points across one site to capture different nights of the week. Prime Steak Concepts is betting on scale, building one large-format restaurant on a footprint that already had decades of brand recognition attached to it. Both bets assume the same underlying gap: a lake with the rooftops, the golf courses and the household incomes to support upscale waterfront dining, but without enough of it actually built.
What Changes on Your Lake Walk
If you already use the greenbelt path along this section of McCormick Ranch, here is the practical shift. As groundbreaking gives way to construction on both sites over the next several months, the stretch between the old Forever Corporate Plaza building and the former Chart House site moves from a mostly quiet office and parking corridor toward one with multiple restaurant patios, a small marina, and boat rentals on the water itself. That is a different kind of evening than what this part of the neighborhood has offered for a while now, and it is happening because two developers, working independently, arrived at the same conclusion about the same water at close to the same time.
For residents who have watched this building sit half-used for years, that is the more interesting story than any single restaurant opening. It is not one operator testing the market. It is two, moving on parallel timelines, treating the same lake as underbuilt.
If you're curious what a changing shoreline means for property values on this part of McCormick Ranch, or you're weighing a move within the neighborhood while these projects take shape, The TEAM can walk you through it. Request a Luxury Home Valuation and we'll put the numbers in front of you, not just the renderings.
