Brandon's Fall Lineup: New Spots, and a Traffic Pattern That's Flipped

"We built it for Brandon and the east side of Sioux Falls so they don't have to drive 20 to 40 minutes." That's Josh Sneller, one half of the cousin duo behind Backspin Golf Simulators, explaining why he and his family picked a strip mall on North Splitrock Boulevard instead of a spot inside Sioux Falls city limits. It's a small sentence, but it says something bigger about where Brandon sits right now. For years, this town has been the place you drove out of for a meal, a coffee, or a round of golf when the weather turned. This fall, that direction is starting to run the other way.

You don't need a market report to see it. You need to look at what opened on Splitrock Boulevard in the last eighteen months, what's landing on Holly Boulevard right now, and what broke ground on the west side of town just last week.

The Golf Bay Built to Keep the Drive Local

Backspin opened its doors on February 13, 2026, in a space that used to be a clothing store at 513 N Splitrock Blvd, right next door to The Gruff Plates + Pours. Sneller and his cousin Alex Van Holland, along with their wives Courtney and Haley, spent nine weeks converting the storefront into three simulator bays. Two are set up for standard play. The third is built about three feet wider than the others specifically for kids, with frisbee golf, basketball, and cornhole mixed in so a parent can hit balls in one bay while their kids play next door.

The screens are 16 feet wide, among the largest available for a business this size, and the co-owners worked with Austad's to laser-measure and install wall paneling instead of the carpeted look most simulator bays default to. None of that is the interesting part on its own. What matters is who Sneller says he built it for. Not just Brandon residents looking for something to do on a Tuesday night in January, but people on the east side of Sioux Falls who'd otherwise be driving across town to find an indoor bay. Brandon simulators aren't new to the region. Sioux Falls already has a handful clustered mostly on the south side. Backspin is the first one aimed at pulling that traffic east instead of assuming it has to travel west.

The Coffee Shop That Chose Brandon Over Staying Small

Annie's Coffee Bar & Roastery tells a version of the same story from the other direction. Owner Anne Pedersen started Annie's in Rowena in 2004, moved it to Garretson in 2009, closed it in 2017, and reopened it there in 2022. In the spring of 2025 she moved again, this time to 721 N Splitrock Blvd in Brandon, just a few blocks from where Backspin would open the following winter.

The math behind that move is worth sitting with. Garretson has roughly 1,100 residents. Brandon has more than 11,000 inside city limits, close to ten times the population Pedersen was drawing from before. She told the Brandon Valley Journal it was her fourth and final move, and the early evidence backed her up. The first Saturday Annie's was open in its new Brandon space, the line stretched out the door. The following Saturday, it stretched further.

Inside, Pedersen built out a space with a coffee-bean brown and burnt orange color scheme, an air roaster that lets her turn out small batches without the oily residue traditional roasters leave behind, and two rooms available for small meetings. The sandwich menu carries local touches too, including the Big Sioux, a shredded pork sandwich with barbecue sauce and Swiss on a toasted hoagie, and a Turkey Cranwich built on cranberry wild rice bread. None of that changes because Pedersen relocated. What changes is where she decided that kind of business belonged. She didn't pick Sioux Falls. She picked Brandon.

The Chains Followed, They Didn't Lead

National retailers have taken notice of the same shift, but they're arriving after the fact rather than setting the pace. Jersey Mike's announced its first Brandon location. Scooter's Coffee opened to what local developer Ryan Tysdal of Van Buskirk Cos. described as an opening day that was "really exciting for Brandon." A second Casey's is going in on Aspen Boulevard across from Brandon Golf Course. Kwik Star and Les Schwab Tire Center are both building at Brandon 90 Plaza on the west side of town.

Then, just last week, Fareway broke ground on a new 21,000-square-foot grocery store at 801 W. Holly Boulevard, its fifth location in South Dakota and its first in Brandon. It's expected to open in fall 2027, which means anyone reading this today will be watching that building go up for the next year. Brandon's development director, Patrick Andrews, has pointed to residential growth on the east side, including plans for roughly 160 townhomes in the Chestnut Ridge area, as part of what's giving retailers the confidence to commit.

The distinction that matters here is sequencing. A national chain decides to open in a town because the population and traffic numbers already justify it. Annie's and Backspin didn't have that data to lean on. Pedersen was leaving a business with two decades of loyal Garretson customers. Sneller and Van Holland were converting a clothing store with no guarantee anyone would show up. They bet on Brandon before the chains did, and the fall of 2026 is the season where you can see both bets paying off on the same half-mile stretch of Splitrock Boulevard.

Fall Weekends Now Have Their Own Local Anchors

None of this replaces what Brandon already had going for it outdoors. The Big Sioux Recreation Area sits between Brandon and Sioux Falls along the Big Sioux River, with hiking trails running along the riverbank and up through wooded bluffs, plus a bike connection that will eventually link to the Sioux Falls trail system. It's an easy add-on to a Saturday that starts with coffee at Annie's.

For families, Jellystone Park's corn maze is running through October 11 this year, seven acres of turns with select nights open for flashlight and moonlight navigation, plus wagon rides and mini-golf on the same grounds. It's the kind of thing that used to mean loading the car for a drive south to Harrisburg or into Sioux Falls proper. Now it's a maze inside Brandon's own borders, on a fall calendar that also includes a golf bay for the days the weather doesn't cooperate and a coffee shop that plans a patio addition out front.

Put it together and the picture is less about any single opening and more about direction. A cousin-owned golf business built explicitly to intercept Sioux Falls traffic. A twenty-year-old coffee roaster who left a smaller town because Brandon offered more reach. A grocery chain betting on a neighborhood that doesn't exist yet. Those aren't three separate stories. They're the same story told by three different kinds of business owners, all pointing the same way.

If you've lived in Brandon for a while, you've probably felt this shift already, even if you hadn't put a name to it. The town stopped being the place you left on a Friday night and started being the place people are driving into.

If you're watching Brandon from the outside and wondering what a market like this looks like up close, whether you're weighing a move here or just curious what your own street might be worth given how fast the retail and residential picture is changing, Berberich Real Estate Group knows this corridor block by block. Schedule a consultation and we'll walk through what's actually happening on the ground, not just what the chains are betting on.