Down Gessner Road, One Landlord Is Building Both Ends of Your Errand Run
Most Sandalwood mornings run the same loop. Coffee and dry cleaning toward Memorial City, maybe a stop at the mall if the kids need shoes. If your afternoon errands send you the other way, past Beltway 8 toward CityCentre, you've probably never stopped to ask who owns the buildings on either end of that drive. This year, the answer is the same company, and that fact explains more about what's opening near you than any single new restaurant does.
MetroNational is the Houston firm behind Memorial City Mall, a family-owned company founded in 1954 that, as of a June 2026 company release, oversees 11 million square feet of commercial real estate across the region. In 2025, MetroNational also acquired the retail component of CityCentre and brought in the same development partner, Radom Capital, to remake both properties. That means the two shopping nodes that bracket Sandalwood, the ones that have always felt like separate destinations you happen to visit on different days, are now being redeveloped by the same landlord using the same playbook on both ends.
The clearest evidence of that playbook is sitting on the north side of I-10 right now. At 1085 Gessner Road, MetroNational and Radom Capital are converting three old warehouses into Greenside, a roughly 35,000-square-foot mix of dining, wellness, and beauty tenants designed by Michael Hsu Office of Architecture. Walkways will tie the new construction into an existing cluster MetroNational built out in 2020, anchored by Torchy's Tacos, Mia's Table, and Kirby Ice House. In other words, Greenside isn't a new destination competing with what's already there down Gessner. It's the connective tissue MetroNational is building between a hub that already works and a mall it already owns.
Here's the part that's useful to know before you plan a visit: the timeline has already slipped once, and the public announcements show exactly how much.
Add it up and a project originally pitched for a summer opening is now pointed at the fourth quarter, a slip of several months inside an eighteen-month window. If you've been eyeing that stretch of Gessner hoping to see lights on, the honest answer is not this month, and probably not the next one either.
Buried in the June announcement is a detail that says more than the press release intends. Epic Cycles, a cycling retailer with a 1,974-square-foot space at Greenside, isn't a new business coming to the area. It's relocating from its current location at CityCentre. That's not two competing shopping centers each attracting their own tenants. That's one landlord moving a business from one of its properties to the other, which only makes sense if you already know MetroNational controls both addresses. For Sandalwood households who ride the trails at Bendwood Park or take bikes out on the weekend, it's also a small, practical fact worth filing away: your bike shop is packing up and moving a couple of miles east sometime this year.
As Danna Diamond, MetroNational's vice president of leasing, put it when the June tenants were announced, Greenside is meant to be "a place where people want to gather and enjoy thoughtfully crafted experiences." The Epic Cycles move suggests that experience is being assembled from pieces MetroNational already owns, not built from scratch.
While Greenside's calendar keeps sliding, CityCentre's is already full and dated. Its free event lineup for 2026 has included the Green 6.2 Race community run on April 4, 2026, the recurring Parachute Playtime for younger kids every third Friday, and a Worldwide Soccer Kickoff Celebration on June 20, 2026 with samba dancers and a big screen on the plaza. This week specifically, CityCentre has Taste of CityCentre on Thursday, August 13, and Cheers for Charity on Saturday, August 15. None of that requires a construction crew to finish anything. It's already there, a short drive from Sandalwood, and it's the side of the MetroNational portfolio that's furthest along.
None of this touches the parts of Sandalwood that have nothing to do with a developer's timeline. The neighborhood's three private, spring-fed lakes are still there for swimming, fishing, and sailing, with lighted walking paths and a private playground that have nothing to do with what MetroNational does at either end of Gessner. Bendwood Park's tennis courts and jogging paths are still a short walk for most of the neighborhood, and the Houston Racquet Club, with its 41 courts, is still the kind of amenity that doesn't depend on a shell construction schedule. The corridor around Sandalwood is being rebuilt one warehouse and one retail lease at a time. The neighborhood itself isn't waiting on any of it.
The practical takeaway isn't that Greenside will be worth a special trip the day it opens, though it probably will be. It's that the two shopping centers bracketing Sandalwood are no longer being run as separate concerns competing for your errands. They're being run as one project by one landlord, staffed in part by tenants moving between the two, on a timeline that has already proven longer than first advertised. That's a different way to think about the corridor than "what's new down the street," and it's the kind of detail that only shows up if you're reading the trade press rather than the ribbon-cutting announcements.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own plans in Sandalwood, whether that's timing a move, understanding how a changing corridor affects your home's position in the market, or just making sense of what's coming next, Yolanda Ingram has spent more than two decades tracking exactly this kind of shift in The Woodlands and the neighborhoods around it. Reach out anytime to request a personalized home valuation and talk through what's changing near you.
Rooted in resilience and driven by purpose, I approach each real estate journey with heart, integrity, and a commitment to building lasting relationships—because every home marks a new beginning worth celebrating.
YOLANDA INGRAM
1335 Lake Woodlands Dr Ste C The Woodlands, TX 77380