The long-vacant Bi-Lo at Cedar Springs Crossing in Spartanburg is getting a new life as corporate headquarters. Dearybury Oil & Gas, a family-owned fuel distributor that has operated out of a cramped Southport Road office for years, has purchased the shopping center and plans to convert the old grocery anchor into roughly 10,000 square feet of offices and 9,000 square feet of warehouse space.
The company bought the property, excluding some outparcels, for $6 million, according to the Post and Courier. Cedar Springs Crossing sits at the far southern end of Spartanburg and still includes a Dollar Tree, a Domino's Pizza, a Subway and other stores that the company says it will continue to support. The 45,000-square-foot anchor space once occupied by Bi-Lo had sat largely empty, with a prior listing from The Palomar Group describing it as vacant with two years of rent remaining.
Outgrowing the Old Office
Dearybury's current headquarters sits about a mile down Southport Road, and company president Bill Dearybury said the firm has simply run out of room. He said there isn't even enough space to spread out construction drawings at the existing location, and with 11 additional employees on the way, there's no room left to grow where the company sits now.
The hunt for a new home took years. John Bauknight, who works for Roadstead Real Estate Advisors Upstate, assisted Dearybury in that search, and the company ultimately decided to sell underperforming assets and buy something new to cut costs rather than keep patching together space at its old site.
From Grocery Aisles to Fuel Logistics
The Dearybury family of companies sells and transports fuel, primarily oil and gas, moving between 600 million and 800 million gallons each year across the southeastern United States. The business traces back to 1948, when it was founded in Cowpens, and about 75 percent of its employees still live in Spartanburg County.
Bill Dearybury said the move reflects a desire to stay rooted close to home. He called Cedar Springs Crossing a community staple and said the company wanted to remain part of the community where it has operated for generations.
Building a Business Park, Not Just an Office
Beyond housing its own operations, Dearybury plans to develop the broader property as a business park, subdividing and leasing the remaining anchor-space area to other companies. Bill Dearybury said he wants to attract businesses beyond retail to the site and is hoping to bring in some of the company's own vendors as tenants. He noted that the surrounding area is industrializing, but said few nearby businesses have taken advantage of that shift yet.
That ambition lines up with broader conditions in the regional retail market. Greenville-Spartanburg recorded its first quarter of net negative retail absorption in more than a year in early 2025, a trend Colliers attributed to a wave of national retailer bankruptcies. The same report found that three former Big Lots spaces in the market quickly turned over to local or non-discounter tenants, suggesting empty big-box spaces can still find new uses. A separate report from SCBiz noted that Cedar Springs Crossing, built in 2000 with 75,662 square feet of retail space, was about 15 percent vacant as of a prior 2025 assessment, with six spaces listed for lease at the time.
City Support and Tax Credits
Spartanburg city officials helped Dearybury navigate the move within city limits and assisted in securing state tax credits for the project. The Spartanburg City Council voted in September to make the site eligible for those credits, a step Bill Dearybury called a big deal for the company.
Cedar Springs Crossing had previously changed hands as part of a larger portfolio purchase. The SCBiz report noted that Legacy Commercial Property, based in Brentwood, Tennessee, had bought the center along with other properties nationally and planned investments to improve them, citing Spartanburg's projected 2.7 percent growth over five years as a development opportunity. Now, with Dearybury Oil & Gas in control, the shopping center that once anchored neighborhood grocery trips is set to anchor something else entirely: a hometown fuel company's long-sought new home.
