Scheels, Highway 65, and the Four-Year Question Every Blaine Homeowner Should Be Asking

Short answer, because it is the question I am actually getting: the Highway 65 rebuild and the new Scheels will probably do both. Construction runs June 2026 through summer 2030. If you sell in 2026 or 2027, you are selling into the disruption. If you sell in 2028 or later, you are selling next to a finished $750 million district. Same house, two very different markets.

So the question is not whether to sell into a construction zone. If you live near 105th and Radisson, that decision was made for you. The question is which year of the construction zone you sell into, and those years are not interchangeable.

What Actually Got Approved

Two things happened, and the local coverage ran them together in a way that makes the timing confusing.

The big one is MnDOT's. Highway 65 through Blaine is being rebuilt as a freeway between 97th Avenue and 121st Avenue / Paul Parkway, with grade-separated interchanges at 99th, 105th, 109th and 117th/Cloud Drive. It is a $195 million project and it runs June 2026 through summer 2030.

The second is Anoka County's, and it is the one that moved. The county has a $3.878 million contract, awarded in June, to improve the intersections at 105th and 109th Avenues NE so that traffic detoured off Highway 65 has somewhere to go. That work includes a new signal at 109th and Tournament Players Parkway, and a widened 109th and Radisson with dual left-turn lanes in every direction.

On August 25, the county board amended its agreement with the city to fold in the Scheels site access work. Right-turn lane extensions on the west side of Radisson Road between 105th and 106th, so delivery trucks can reach the back of the store, and the number of access points there drops from three to two. The developer pays the estimated $156,000 through the city.

The part that matters to you is not the $156,000. It is the calendar. That work was scheduled for 2027 and it is now happening this fall, alongside a county mill and resurface of Radisson Road. If you were planning to list next spring and assumed the road would be quiet, it will not be.

The Map That Matters

Four interchanges are being built, but they do not affect you equally. The one that changes daily life on the east side of Highway 65 is 105th, because that is the one feeding The Farm.

The Farm is roughly 70 acres at 105th Avenue, Nassau Street and Radisson Road. The plans include a 5,000-seat ballpark for an American Association expansion team, a 250,000 square foot Scheels flagship with a 750-stall public parking ramp, 450 apartments, 240 hotel rooms, restaurants, pickleball and trails. The stadium and the store are both targeted to open in 2028.

Which gives you the shape of the thing. Radisson Road and 105th are not just under construction. They are being rebuilt to carry the traffic of a district that does not exist yet.

If you are in the 2000s and 2010s subdivisions east of Highway 65 — The Lakes, Sunrise, the Radisson corridor — you are inside that ring. The old Blaine and new Blaine divide has never had a cleaner real-world example than this, and which side of it your house sits on is most of the answer.

Years One and Two: What a Buyer Sees on a Saturday

Here is the honest version of 2026 and 2027.

A buyer drives to your 11am showing. They sit through a temporary signal at Davenport, they take a detour they did not expect, and they arrive slightly annoyed with no idea that any of it is temporary. They walk your house. They like it. Then they sit in the car afterward and ask their agent what all the orange is about, and the honest answer is four more years.

That does not usually kill the sale. What it does is narrow your buyer pool and slow your timeline, and both of those show up as money. A smaller pool means fewer competing offers. A slower timeline means more days on market, and days on market is the number every buyer agent checks before they advise on price.

The sellers who do worst in a stretch like this are the ones who price to the comps from 2025 and then wait for the market to agree. It will not. The sellers who do fine are the ones who price to the road as it is today, get out cleanly, and stop paying attention to what the house might have fetched two years ago.

There is also a real advantage on offer right now and almost nobody is using it: statewide inventory just hit a seven-year high. If you are selling here and buying somewhere else in the metro, the second half of that trade is the best it has been since 2017. Judge the move, not the listing.

Years Three and Four: The Story Flips

Somewhere in 2028, if the schedule holds, the framing inverts completely.

The same proximity that reads as “construction” in 2026 reads as “walk to the ballpark” in 2028. The listing description that currently has to explain the orange barrels instead gets to say the words Scheels, stadium, hotel and restaurants. A grade-separated interchange at 105th is a genuinely better piece of infrastructure than the signalised intersection it replaces, and it will still be there in 2040.

I am not going to put a number on that. Nobody honestly can, and anyone who does is guessing with confidence. What I will say is that the direction is not ambiguous. Finished amenity beats active construction, every time, for the same house on the same block.

So Do You Sell Into It or Hold Through It?

This is the actual decision, and it genuinely goes both ways depending on your situation.

Sell now if your life needs you to. If you have outgrown the house, if the job moved, if the family changed, then holding a house you do not want for four years to capture a premium nobody can quantify is not a strategy. It is a bet with your living situation as the stake. And the buy side of your move is currently favourable in a way that offsets a meaningful part of what you give up on the sell side.

Hold if you were on the fence anyway. If you like the house, the mortgage is comfortable and you were only moving because the road work annoys you, then you are proposing to sell at the worst point in the cycle to escape a temporary condition. Wait it out and you sell into the good version.

And consider renting it, seriously. This is the scenario where “keep it and rent it” actually pencils rather than being a fantasy. A four-year disruption followed by a large permanent amenity is close to a textbook case. It is still a real business with real obligations, and it is not for everyone. But if you have been idly wondering, this is the situation worth running the numbers on properly instead of dismissing.

What all three have in common: the choice should follow your life, not a guess about 2028.

What This Does Not Mean

Now the part that most posts about this will skip.

A big development next door is not an automatic premium. Proximity to a stadium and a 250,000 square foot store is a mixed good. It brings traffic, parking pressure, lights and event-day noise. For a townhome buyer who wants to walk to a game, that is upside. For a family on a quiet cul-de-sac who chose this street because it was quiet, some of it is cost. Those two buyers will not bid the same way, and which one your house attracts depends on your block, not on the district.

And the financing is not settled. The Star Tribune's Eric Roper has reported that the city fronted $35 million for infrastructure, $12 million for turf fields and $63 million for the stadium, is spending $50 million to bring Scheels in and $23 million on a parking ramp, with repayment leaning on sources including sales taxes, franchise fees and municipal cannabis revenue. If those do not perform, the gap lands on property taxpayers who have already absorbed years of double-digit levy increases.

I am not predicting that. I am saying that if you are counting on the district to lift your value, you should also understand that your tax bill is a share of a levy, and the same project sits on both sides of that ledger.

How to Tell Which Side of the Window Your Block Is On

Three questions, in order.

How far are you from 105th and Radisson, honestly? Not as the crow flies. By the route a buyer will actually drive to your front door. A house half a mile away on a street that does not touch a detour is in a different position from one on the detour itself.

Does your route to work change during construction, or only your route to the store? Buyers forgive inconvenience. They price in a commute.

When do you actually need to move? If the answer is “within a year,” the construction window is a pricing input, not a decision. If the answer is “sometime in the next five years,” then it is the whole decision, and it is worth sitting down with a calendar.

If you own near 105th and you have been telling yourself you will move once the road work is finished, I would just make sure you have looked at what that sentence now commits you to. It is a 2030 plan. That may well be the right plan. It should be a choice rather than a default.

Send me your address and roughly when you are thinking. I will tell you which side of this window you are on, what I would price it at today, and what I would expect if you waited. That conversation costs nothing and it is a lot cheaper than guessing at a four-year timeline.