Costco opens its doors at 11910 60th Street NE in four days, on Friday, August 14, at 8 a.m., following a 7:30 a.m. ribbon-cutting hosted by the I-94 West Chamber of Commerce. If you've had a showing scheduled anywhere near that corner of Wright County this month, there's a good chance a buyer has already asked about it. The assumption is simple: a big-box anchor shows up nearby, home values follow. The actual mechanism is more specific than that, and for Albertville, it points somewhere the ribbon-cutting crews aren't standing.
The Costco warehouse sits in Otsego. Not Albertville. The property tax base, the building permits, and the sales tax on every rotisserie chicken and pallet of paper towels sold there belong to the city of Otsego. Albertville shares a border with the site and will absorb plenty of the traffic, but the store itself, and the revenue it generates for municipal services, is Otsego's.
What actually lands inside Albertville's city limits is smaller and getting a fraction of the attention: an approximately 21,000-square-foot Aldi, approved near Mackenzie Avenue NE and 60th Street NE, close to Emma's Express and Just for Kix Dance School. That's the store whose taxes fund Albertville's own budget. That's the anchor inside a real walking or short-drive radius for the households closest to it. If you're trying to figure out what this retail buildout means for a specific block in Albertville, the Aldi is doing more of the actual work than the warehouse getting all the headlines this week.
Two Stores, Two City Halls
| Costco | Aldi | |
|---|---|---|
| City | Otsego | Albertville |
| Location | 11910 60th Street NE, at the 60th & MacIver Avenue NE interchange | Near Mackenzie Avenue NE & 60th Street NE |
| Size | More than 160,000 square feet | About 21,000 square feet |
| Opening | August 14, 2026 | Not yet dated; timeline coordinated with the Costco project |
| Tax base flows to | City of Otsego | City of Albertville |
The distinction matters because retail tax revenue funds the unglamorous things that shape a neighborhood's daily livability long after a grand opening fades from local news: road maintenance, park upkeep, police and fire staffing. Otsego gets that funding stream from Costco. Albertville gets its own version from Aldi, plus whatever comes from two additional commercial lots reportedly planned alongside the Costco site itself.
The Costco will be the 13th in Minnesota and the first in Wright County, arriving with a tire center, pharmacy, optical department, hearing aid center, food court, and a members-only gas station. The company even ran a temporary membership center at 13690 Rogers Drive in Rogers ahead of the permanent store's opening, signing shoppers up at $65 a year for standard membership and $130 for Executive, before closing that location on August 13, the day before the permanent store opens. That's a serious rollout for one store. None of it changes which city hall cashes the checks once the doors are open for good.
The Reliever Effect, Not the Magnet Effect
Brent O'Neil, economic development director for neighboring Elk River, gave the clearest read yet on what this store will actually do to shopping patterns in the area. He described the new Otsego location as a "reliever effect" on the existing Costco stores in Maple Grove and Coon Rapids, positioned to "capture I-94 traffic from west of there" rather than manufacture a wave of brand-new Costco shoppers.
That reading lines up with data the city of Elk River pulled from Placer.ai to understand who was already making the drive from its own backyard. In the twelve months before the Otsego store's opening, people using Elk River's own 55330 zip code logged an estimated 125,000 visits to the Coon Rapids Costco and about 90,000 visits to the Maple Grove Costco. Those are Elk River households driving well past both Otsego and Albertville to reach a warehouse club, often enough to rack up six-figure visit counts in a single year.
If demand was strong enough to routinely pull Elk River shoppers that far up the interstate, it's a safe bet the same demand already existed much closer to home, in Otsego and Albertville, where the drive to Maple Grove or Coon Rapids was shorter to begin with. None of this is a story about a store creating new spending where none existed. It's a story about cutting the drive time on spending that was already happening. If a buyer or a listing agent tells you the new Costco is going to boost home values because it will bring new people to the area, the more honest version is that it will save existing local shoppers a round trip, which is a real convenience but a different economic story than new demand walking in from outside.
The Road Was Never Just About the Store
Costco's opening date wasn't chosen in isolation. It lands close to the tail end of a year-plus road project along County Road 137, also known as Highway 37, that has reshaped this entire interchange since major construction began in September 2025. The project is a partnership between Wright County and the cities of Otsego and Albertville, and it includes new roundabouts at the I-94 interchange ramps and at Lymon Avenue, plus a smaller roundabout Otsego is adding at MacIver and Marlowe avenues. Pedestrian upgrades add trails, a bridge crossing, and a new connection to 62nd Street.
The reconstruction phase closest to the store was expected to substantially wrap by mid-August, nearly the same week Costco opens, with trail and restoration work continuing through late October. If you're listing a home anywhere near this corridor this fall, tell buyers touring the area to expect some cones and gravel shoulders even after the Costco parking lot fills up. The store opens on schedule. The ground around it doesn't finish healing on the same day.
What This Means If You're Watching Albertville This Fall
For sellers on streets closer to the Aldi site, the more direct story for buyers is proximity to a grocery anchor that's actually inside Albertville's own boundaries and tax rolls, not distance to a warehouse club whose revenue belongs to a different city. If you're weighing whether now is the time to list a home near this corridor, that distinction is worth more to a buyer's long-term read on the neighborhood than the Costco name recognition alone.
For buyers comparing a home near this development to one further from it, the honest math includes a few more months of active construction before the roundabouts and trails are finished, weighed against the convenience once they are. New retail investment at this scale rarely arrives without some lasting effect on a local market. It just isn't as simple as a big-box store opening four minutes away and home values rising because of it. The mechanism here is jurisdictional, it's about redirected trips rather than new ones, and it's still tangled up in an active work zone that won't fully quiet down until the leaves are off the trees.
A Few Quick Questions
Is the new Costco actually located in Albertville? No. The address, 11910 60th Street NE, sits in Otsego. The store is close enough to see from parts of Albertville, but the city line runs between them, and so does the tax base.
Will construction near 60th Street still be visible this fall? Likely yes. Road reconstruction in this corridor was expected to substantially finish by mid-August, with trail and landscaping restoration continuing through late October.
Does a nearby Aldi affect home value differently than a nearby Costco? The scale is smaller, but the Aldi is the anchor whose tax revenue and walkable convenience belong to Albertville specifically, which tends to matter more for a home's day-to-day desirability than proximity to a much larger store sitting in a neighboring city's jurisdiction.
Talk to Someone Who's Watching Both Sides of the Line
If you're trying to figure out what this corridor actually means for a specific street in Albertville, that's not a question a national data feed can answer with a zip code average. Tara Renstrom Homes tracks this stretch of Wright County closely, from the Albertville side of 60th Street to the Otsego side, and can walk you through what a home near this development is worth right now, construction and all. Get a free home valuation and schedule a consultation, and we'll look at your actual address, not just the headlines.
