Lakeshore Mall is a one-story enclosed shopping mall on U.S. Highway 27 North in Sebring, Florida. It opened in 1992 with four department stores, and Sears made it five in 1999.
Three of those five stores closed between 2018 and 2020. Kmart was the first to go. Once the mall's owner sold the Kmart building, it was converted into climate-controlled storage.
The old Sears took longer. It sat for years without a store. Then Rural King opened in the building in 2026, and the mall now lists the farm-and-home chain as one of its anchors.
Today the mall shares its stretch of U.S. 27 with a storage business in the old Kmart and a Rural King in the old Sears. Bealls and Belk are still open in the spaces they took in 1992.
Lakeshore Mall opens on U.S. 27
The movie theater opened first.
On January 31, 1992, Floyd Theatres opened an eight-screen cinema at one end of a new building on U.S. Highway 27 North, and five days later the rest of the building opened around it.
That building is Lakeshore Mall, a one-story enclosed shopping mall at 901 U.S. Highway 27 North in Sebring, Florida.
CBL & Associates built it and opened it on February 5, 1992, under the same name it carries today, and it's still open.
The mall is an L on a single floor, with the cinema at one end and Kmart at the other.
JCPenney, Bealls, and Belk filled out the anchors, so Sebring's main commercial road got four department stores under one roof.
Seven years later, the mall grew.
A 92,000-square-foot addition opened in July 1999 for Sears, the fifth department store, and it took Lakeshore to roughly half a million square feet.
The small shops thin out
In 2008 a new retail center, Plaza by the Mall, went up on the property immediately north of Lakeshore.
No other enclosed regional mall stood within 40 miles of Sebring, and Lakeshore's five department stores were all open.
The smaller shops were thinning out. In 2008, 93 percent of the mall's shop space was leased. By 2011 it was 78 percent.
Through the 2010s the shops that remained included names like RadioShack, Payless ShoeSource, FYE, and Claire's, with Sbarro in the food court.
CBL had built the mall and owned it for 22 years.
By 2014 the company was selling off its lower-productivity properties, and that May it sold Lakeshore to B.V. Belk Properties for $14 million.
Heated recliners and new roofs
The mall B.V. Belk Properties bought still had much of its 1990s interior.
In 2015 that meant patterned tile floors, low ceilings away from the skylight at center court, built-in planters and benches near the Sears court, and older tile at the JCPenney entrance.
The new owner started replacing that interior.
It added lounge seating with charging stations, refreshed the food-court seating, rebuilt the public restrooms, and brought in 10 kiosks.
It also replaced the roofs over JCPenney and Bealls.
After Hurricane Irma, JCPenney got a broader interior overhaul in early 2018, with new store fixtures and lighting, new carpet and ceiling tiles, and fresh paint.
The cinema got its own rebuild in 2018.
AMC, which by then ran the theater, spent about $2.6 million on the auditoriums, lobby, concessions, and restrooms and put in heated reclining seats.
Late in 2018, it signed on to stay another 10 years.
Kmart, Sears, and JCPenney close
Four years later, the department store at the other end of the L closed.
Sears Holdings announced the Sebring Kmart's closing in November 2017, and the store shut on January 28, 2018.
Sears went next. The company put Sebring on a new list of closings on August 6, 2019, and the store shut that October, 20 years after its wing opened.
The next big tenant was a gym.
Planet Fitness took 10 storefronts near center court, between JCPenney and Belk, and joined them into one space of nearly 23,000 square feet.
It opened in February 2020.
Four months later, JCPenney named the Sebring store among 154 it would close in its Chapter 11 restructuring.
Its new carpet and ceiling tiles were barely two years old, and the store shut later that year.
In under three years, three of the mall's five department stores had closed, and Bealls and Belk were the only two left.
Early in 2021, the empty JCPenney became Highlands County's COVID-19 vaccination site.
The county ran large vaccination days in the old department store until May 22, 2021.
Storage units and a Rural King
The other two empty stores ended up outside the mall's ownership.
In June 2021, the mall's owner sold the Kmart building to a self-storage company for $3 million.
Conversion to climate-controlled storage was underway in April 2023 when sparks from the construction work set off a fire that damaged part of the building.
Smoke came through an opening in the roof left by Hurricane Ian.
The work carried on after the fire, and the old Kmart is now a Your Storage Units, with its own address at 903 U.S. Highway 27 North and a drive-through entrance.
The Sears building was separately owned, and no store moved into it for years.
In October 2024, a buyer tied to Rural King bought the old Sears and the land beside it, and work for the farm-and-home chain was underway by June 2025.
Rural King opened there with a ribbon-cutting on April 17, 2026, as the chain's 150th store. That was six and a half years after Sears closed.
The mall lists Rural King as one of its anchors, though the building belongs to another owner.
Lakeshore Mall under a Texas owner
That split showed when Lakeshore went up for auction in July 2026.
The offering left out the Rural King building and the storage units. Bidding opened on July 20 with a $3 million starting bid.
The mall had sold for $14 million in 2014, and the Kmart building alone had brought $3 million in 2021.
In August ICA Properties of Odessa, Texas, bought the mall, and the price wasn't made public.
By September ICA had six spaces up for lease, and the biggest was the old JCPenney, without a store since 2020.
Bealls and Belk are still in the spaces they opened in 1992.
The mall now closes at 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday, two hours earlier than it did in the 2010s.
Golden Years Senior Center is a tenant, and the mall's calendar runs bingo and vendor markets through the year.
Independent Publisher Notice
BestAttractions is an independent editorial publisher. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any location, business, property owner, manager, government agency, or organization described in this article.
Comments posted on this page are not forwarded to, reviewed by, or acted upon by any entity mentioned in the article.
For official inquiries, complaints, applications, bookings, or other requests, please contact the relevant entity directly through its official website or other verified channels.