The Indian River Mall — Vero Beach, Florida

The Indian River Mall is being cut roughly in half. In June 2026 crews began tearing down the former Macy's and Sears anchors and the east wing of the enclosed mall on the State Road 60 corridor, the first phase of a plan by its owner, DTS Properties II, to replace the dead wing with large open-air stores, WFLX and Vero Beach 32963 reported. The west wing, with Dillard's, JCPenney and the movie theater, stays open during the work.

The mall carries a Vero Beach mailing address but is not in the city. A November 2024 Vero News column described the redevelopment as a future gathering place outside the Vero Beach city limits, and every approval so far has come from Indian River County planning staff and the Indian River County Commission rather than Vero Beach City Hall.

The mall opened in 1996, late in the era of enclosed suburban malls. According to Vero News, the Debartolo Corporation developed it with JCPenney, Sears, Dillard's and Burdines as anchors, and a 24-screen theater followed a year later. Burdines became Macy's in 2005. The departures then came in waves: Gap, Disney Store and RJ Gator's in 2008, Sears in 2019, and Macy's, Victoria's Secret and TGI Friday's in 2020.

Ownership failed before the stores did. Simon Malls entered foreclosure in 2014, owing $71 million on the mall and the neighboring Indian River Commons plaza. At a 2015 auction nobody bid, and the lender took the Indian River County property back; Vero Beach 32963 summarized the outcome as a mall that entered foreclosure in 2014 and was sold the next year at auction to Wells Fargo for $100. Kohan Retail Investment Group bought it in 2017 for $12 million but could not refill the corridors. By June 2024, Vero News counted 25 empty retail shops and 13 storefronts used by a church.

DTS assembled the site in steps. Already the owner since 2016 of Indian River Commons, the plaza with Best Buy and Michaels east of the mall, it paid $4.75 million in March 2024 for the parcel holding the former Macy's building plus land west of the mall, then $14.8 million on May 16, 2024 for the main mall.

Vero Beach 32963 reported in July 2026 that American Demolition & Environmental Services of Fern Park began tearing down the 104,000-square-foot Macy's building and 120,000-square-foot Sears store in June, then gutted about 150,000 more square feet, everything east of the old main entrance. That matches the April 2025 site plan, which Vero Beach 32963 said would shrink the Indian River Mall structure by about 35 percent.

Four big tenants remain. The Dillard's and JCPenney stores, which DTS does not own, stay open, as do AMC Classic Indian River 24 and Casa Amigos Mexican Kitchen. The Garden Grove food court is empty and walled off, and DTS has said a family entertainment tenant will take that space. While work continues, the south entrance facing State Road 60 is closed and shoppers use the two north doors on either side of the theater, or enter through the anchor stores.

Phase one is a strip of large, outward-facing stores. Plans described by Vero Beach 32963 in March 2026 show a drive-through restaurant at the eastern end and five large retail spaces totaling 115,000 square feet fronting a rebuilt parking lot toward Route 60, with a park-like green connecting them to the surviving west wing of the Indian River Mall. In July 2026 the paper reported each of the five units would measure 18,000 to 25,000 square feet, joined by a covered walkway.

Sprouts, an upscale grocery market, will lease one of those spaces, and DTS says the other four are committed but unnamed as of July 2026. A freestanding 4,500-square-foot drive-through pad had no tenant yet. A DTS project manager estimated that the first stores would open in late 2027 or early 2028 and said no new mall leases would be signed until demolition noise and dust are over. WFLX reported in June 2026 that the finished Indian River Mall property is planned at around 300,000 square feet of retail, restaurants and possible residential space.

The format is a deliberate break from the 1996 layout. Instead of one long interior corridor lined with small shops and kiosks, the rebuilt east end of the Indian River Mall will put larger stores with their own outside entrances along State Road 60, under a shaded walkway, while construction plans call for the redesigned parking lots to gain trees and landscaping. The enclosed west wing remains for shoppers who still want indoor space in the Vero Beach summer heat.

The early concepts were bigger. A pre-application filed with Indian River County in July 2024, described by Vero News, proposed five apartment buildings with 56 units in each building, a total of 280 residential units, a five-story 120-room motel along the 26th Street side, four large stores and a 9,775-square-foot school with 10 classrooms, plus removal of about half the theater screens. The April 2025 version raised the hotel to 130 rooms.

Height and land use were the obstacles. On September 10, 2024 a majority of the Indian River County Commission said it would at least discuss letting the owner build a 45-foot-high hotel in a county with a 35-foot height limit, Vero News reported, while Commissioner Joe Flescher opposed any waiver. The 2025 plan also noted that the mall's Regional Commercial land use designation does not allow homes, so housing would need a land use amendment or a planned development approval from the county.

By July 2026 the hotel looked unlikely, according to the DTS project manager, who pointed instead to affordable housing under Florida's Live Local Act of 2023, which can allow residences in commercial zones. None of the later phases had county approval as of that report, and the March 2026 county drawings for the Indian River Mall did not show them.

Indian River County does. Engineering drawings reviewed by Vero Beach 32963 in March 2026 showed that county planning staff had sent two rounds of comments and had issued no formal approvals; a provisional site plan approval was needed before a demolition permit. The county's Technical Review Committee took up the April 2025 plan at its May 7, 2025 meeting.

The city's rules differ, and Vero Beach leaders noticed. When the hotel height question surfaced in September 2024, Vero Beach 32963 reported that city officials, then asking voters to raise downtown density, worried the county's openness would color the city vote. Mayor John Cotugno answered that Vero Beach, unlike the county, is governed by a charter, so a similar waiver could not happen inside the city without a referendum.