Walmart Buys Spot Festival Grounds for $15.5M, Files Plans

The rumors going around Hampstead this summer are true, and the paperwork is more specific than the rumors are.

Walmart has filed plans with Pender County for a 171,128-square-foot store on the U.S. 17 land that has hosted the North Carolina Spot Festival since 1983. The filing lays out 732 parking spaces, a 20-pump fuel center, an outdoor garden center and six separate outparcels for future restaurants and shops. It went on the Pender County Technical Review Committee agenda for July 2 as case MDP 2026-95, the “Hampstead Walmart Master Development Plan.”

The applicant is Wal-Mart Real Estate Business Trust — Walmart’s own real estate arm, not a developer hoping to land a tenant. The company bought the core of the site outright in March 2025 for $15.5 million.

That is the part that separates this from the last two times somebody promised Hampstead a shopping center.

But there is a lot the filing does not say, starting with what it does to a highway that already carries 43,000 cars a day.

What’s on the Drawings

The agenda packet Pender County posted in June runs to full site plan sheets, prepared by Kimley-Horn and Associates, surveyed by Atwell, LLC and designed by SGA Design Group — the same architecture firm behind Walmart stores across the country.

The store sits on the western side of U.S. 17, about 1,282 feet southwest of the N.C. 210 intersection, on a 51-acre project area of which 50 acres are developable. The land is already zoned General Business.

Element	Proposed
Store	171,128 sq ft
Parking	732 spaces
Fuel center	20 pumps
Garden center	Outdoor, attached
Outparcels	6
Site	51 acres

Water would come from Pender County Utilities. Sewer would come from Pluris, LLC, the private utility that serves much of Hampstead. The plan sheets flag existing wetlands on the property and include stormwater control measures, though no wetland acreage appears anywhere in the packet.

The drawings are stamped “NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION,” which is normal at this stage. These are review documents, not the blueprints anyone builds from.

The Traffic Question Nobody Has Answered

The filing projects the finished development will generate 16,758 vehicle trips per day — 539 cars in and 483 out during the morning rush, 703 in and 701 out during the evening.

Now the context the filing leaves out. NCDOT’s traffic volume counts put the 2024 average daily traffic on the U.S. 17 segment south of N.C. 210 — the stretch fronting this property — at 43,000 vehicles. Two-tenths of a mile north, past Factory Road, the count reaches 47,500. The same frontage segment measured 31,000 in 2010, meaning traffic there has grown roughly 39 percent in fourteen years, before anyone breaks ground on this.

Trip-generation numbers are not a straight addition. A meaningful share of those 16,758 trips would be drivers already on U.S. 17 who pull in rather than drive past, so the real net increase is smaller than the raw figure. But the packet contains no traffic impact analysis, no NCDOT driveway permit condition, and no signal or turn-lane commitment. There is nothing in the file that says how those cars get in and out, or what happens to the traffic already there when they do.

The last time anyone studied this corridor in depth was 2012, when the Wilmington Urban Area MPO and NCDOT produced a U.S. 17 / N.C. 210 corridor study. Working from 2009 counts of 28,000 vehicles a day south of N.C. 210 and 33,000 north of it — numbers this corridor blew past years ago — that study projected that all signalized intersections in the study area would operate at level of service E or worse during at least one peak hour by 2020, with the single exception of U.S. 17 at Sloop Point Loop Road. It also found crash rates on U.S. 17 and N.C. 210 running 16 and 19 percent above the statewide average, counting 628 crashes on U.S. 17 over a 65-month period ending in December 2010.

No agency has published an updated U.S. 17 / N.C. 210 corridor study since.

Relief Is Coming, But Not Soon Enough

Two NCDOT projects are meant to fix this, and the timing matters.

The Hampstead Bypass, which NCDOT puts at $490 million, is under construction now. WECT reported in February that the northern B segment is roughly 65 percent complete and expected to open a first portion in early summer 2027, while the southern A section from I-140 to N.C. 210 began construction in August and stands at roughly 10 percent. Full completion is slated for 2030.

The improvements to U.S. 17 through Hampstead are a separate project and further out. NCDOT lists the access-management and superstreet work, project U-5732, as running from south of Washington Acres Road through Hampstead to Vista Lane — limits that take in the N.C. 210 intersection. Regional project listings currently show U-5732 funded for preliminary engineering, with right-of-way acquisition not anticipated until around 2029 and construction well beyond that. We could not confirm the exact current programming from published documents; NCDOT Division 3 is the office that holds it.

What is clear either way: if Walmart builds on anything like a normal schedule, the store opens years before the road in front of it is rebuilt.

Meanwhile the growth continues. Pender County has gone from 60,203 residents in the 2020 census to an estimated 72,111 in 2025 — nearly 20 percent in five years. In January, the county planning board voted 5-2 to approve 355 homes off Olde Point Road, a project whose own traffic study anticipated about 3,200 daily trips.

Do We Need It?

It is a fair question, and the map answers part of it.

There is already a Walmart Supercenter about 7.5 miles south of the proposed site, at 8035 Market St. in the Porters Neck area — an eleven-minute drive straight down U.S. 17 in normal traffic. Roughly 11.9 miles the other direction, in Surf City, there is a Walmart Neighborhood Market, the smaller grocery-focused format, at 420 Fun Center Drive. That one is about nineteen minutes away, north on U.S. 17 and then east on N.C. 210 toward the beach.

Hampstead sits between them. A full Supercenter here would be the third Walmart within roughly twenty miles, and would convert what is now a fifteen-to-twenty-minute drive for most Hampstead residents into a five-minute one.

Whether that convenience is worth adding a major traffic generator to the corridor’s worst pinch point, years ahead of the road improvements designed to handle it, is the argument Hampstead is about to have. Nothing in the county file engages it. The Technical Review Committee’s role is technical, not political — the packet asks members “to review and provide comment on the request,” and because the land already carries commercial zoning, no rezoning vote is required.

There is no public hearing scheduled on the development approval itself. Residents who want a say will need to look downstream, to the NCDOT driveway permit, the stormwater review and any wetland permitting the site requires.

Twice Before, Nothing Was Built

Anyone who has lived in Hampstead a while has heard this before, which is the strongest argument for patience.

In 2023, word spread that a Target-anchored retail center was coming to this exact tract, with names like TJ Maxx and Five Below attached to the chatter. Target never confirmed any of it. Festival chairman Keith Ramsey later told the StarNews that Target had been in conversation to buy the land — a prospective purchase, not a signed anchor lease. When the paper surveyed Target’s North Carolina pipeline, Hampstead was not on the list. Wilmington, Fayetteville, Selma, Mebane and Fuquay-Varina were.

What did exist was a real approval. In July 2023, the Technical Review Committee signed off on a master development plan for a retail center on the tract, filed by Tanner Postal Commercial Real Estate LLC of Boca Raton, Florida, an affiliate of Impeccable Development. No tenants were ever confirmed; the StarNews reported that brands associated with the developer included Popeye’s, Freddy’s Frozen Custard and AutoZone. That approval was good through July 13, 2025, and it expired without a shovel touching dirt. As of August 2024 — the last reporting on it — no further applications had been filed.

Ramsey’s summary of that collapse, in an email to the paper, was four words: “Apparently the land sale fell through.”

The difference now is ownership. Neither previous suitor ever closed. Walmart recorded a deed — Book 4859, Page 1173 — on the 41.76-acre core parcel in March 2025 and paid $15.5 million for it. A company that has spent that much on dirt is not usually shopping the idea around.

One wrinkle is worth knowing: the site plan covers 51 acres across four parcel numbers, and county records list Walmart as owner of only one of them. The remaining three are recorded to Pender County, to a corporate owner and to an individual. The county-owned parcel is far larger than this project, so only a slice of it could be involved, and the packet may reflect purchase agreements or easements not yet recorded. But Walmart’s recorded ownership covers 41.76 acres of a 51-acre plan, and nobody has publicly explained the rest.

How Long Would This Actually Take?

Walmart has said nothing. Asked directly about the site, a company spokesperson told the StarNews: “We don’t have any information to share about this, right now.” There is no announced groundbreaking, no building permit and no construction schedule in any document reviewed for this story.

The closest comparison is in Brunswick County, where Walmart is building a Supercenter of almost exactly the same size in Carolina Shores — a project surveyed by Atwell, the same firm on the Hampstead plans. There, plans were submitted in April 2024, the town’s board of commissioners approved them in June 2024, construction was visibly underway by March 2026, and the store is expected to open later this year. That is about two years from filing to construction and roughly two and a half to opening.

Run that same clock on a filing that reached Pender County in mid-2026 and you get construction around 2028 and an opening in 2029. Hampstead’s approval path is shorter than Carolina Shores’, which needed an actual vote from elected officials — here the existing zoning means there is no vote to win, only permits and construction plans to clear. So it could run faster. But nobody has announced anything, and the honest answer is that this is our arithmetic on somebody else’s project, not a schedule.

What Happens to the Spot Festival

The North Carolina Spot Festival has been held since 1963 and moved to the field in front of the Hampstead Community Center in 1983. It is not a small thing: proceeds are split between the fire department and the five Topsail-area schools in the Pender County system, and the StarNews reported, citing the festival’s Facebook page, that $36,000 went to those schools in 2024.

Ramsey has been straight with reporters about the risk. Ahead of last year’s festival he said its future was uncertain beyond 2025, and the paper reported the board was looking for a new home and open to hearing from property owners. In its June story, the StarNews restated a position Ramsey had given previously — that the festival will have to find a new location in 2026 if Walmart is able to start construction before then.

As of this writing, nothing has been announced. A FestivalNet listing updated July 15 still advertises the festival for November 7-8, 2026, at 14221 U.S. 17 — the same field. The festival’s own website has not been updated since 2019 and should not be read as current.

Sixty-three years in, the Spot Festival’s future now depends on a permitting timeline nobody outside Bentonville and the Pender County planning office can see.

What We Could Not Confirm

We would rather tell you what we don’t know than let you assume we checked.

What the review committee decided on July 2. Pender County has published no minutes for that meeting, or for any 2026 Technical Review Committee meeting. We confirmed the case was on the agenda; we cannot confirm what came of it. MDP 2026-95 does not appear on the August 6 agenda, which is consistent with the review having wrapped up, but that is an inference. Anyone telling you the plan was “approved” is not getting that from the public record.

How Walmart controls the rest of the site. Three of the four parcels in the plan are recorded to other owners.

The current funding status of the U.S. 17 superstreet project. NCDOT’s project limits are documented. The exact right-of-way and construction years in the current State Transportation Improvement Program are not something we could pull from published documents.

Whether the Spot Festival has a 2026 home. No announcement either way. The festival’s Facebook page is where that would surface first.

Any construction timeline. The 2028-2029 window above is our estimate from a comparable project, not a company statement.

Walmart’s position. The company declined to confirm the project when the StarNews asked.

This story is reported from public records rather than interviews, and we have flagged the gaps rather than filled them. We will update this article as answers surface. If you have documentation that changes any of it, tell us — see our corrections policy.

Source Documents

Every claim above can be checked:

Document	What it supports
Pender County TRC agenda, July 2, 2026	Case MDP 2026-95 on the agenda
TRC agenda packet, July 2, 2026	Site specifications, traffic projections, design team
Pender County meeting record	Event page for the July 2 meeting
NCDOT traffic volume maps	2024 counts of 43,000 and 47,500 vehicles per day
WMPO / NCDOT U.S. 17–N.C. 210 Corridor Study, March 2012	2009 counts, level-of-service projections, crash rates
NCDOT Hampstead Bypass project page	$490 million, segments, U-5732 limits
WECT, Feb. 24, 2026	Bypass progress, summer 2027, 2030 completion
Pender County GIS	Parcel ownership, deed, acreage, zoning
Deed Book 4859, Page 1173	$15.5M, March 2025, 41.76 acres — Register of Deeds, 805 S. Walker St., Burgaw
U.S. Census QuickFacts	Pender County 60,203 to 72,111
Port City Daily, Jan. 9, 2026	355 homes, planning board 5-2, 3,200 daily trips
StarNews, June 23, 2026	Filing coverage, phasing
StarNews, Oct. 17, 2025	Land sale, Walmart declines comment, Target context
StarNews, Aug. 8, 2024	Prior retail center approval and lapse
Brunswick Beacon, June 10, 2024	Carolina Shores approval, Atwell, comparable size
Port City Daily, June 29, 2026	Independent confirmation of the agenda item

Pull them yourself: Pender County meeting records are at penderconc.portal.civicclerk.com. Deed records are at the Register of Deeds, 805 S. Walker St., Burgaw, 910-259-1200 — ask for Book 4859, Page 1173.