For a short time in the early 1990s, a bungee jumping business operated in an empty field on Oleander Drive. Inside a store across the road, Donna Schmetterer would yell “Bungee alert!” and customers and employees would flock to the windows to watch people fly off a tower on a cord.

Although the bungee jumpers are gone, The Audio Lab, the audio/video business Schmetterer and her husband, Richard, started in 1991 at 5732 Oleander Drive, is still around. And these days, the 5700 block and nearby is seeing a noticeable increase in commercial real estate activity along a less than two-mile stretch, where in recent months a variety of shops and offices have moved in or are preparing to open soon.

“Things are happening, finally,” Richard Schmetterer said Friday.

Some of those happenings include stores, a gym and an office. The Schmetterers own the building Audio Lab occupies and recently rented a nearly 2,000-square-foot section of it to a franchise called Painting with a Twist, a business where customers can sip wine while they create works of art with the help of an art instructor.

“We’re in the process of upfitting the space now” to get ready for the September move-in of the second North Carolina location for Painting with a Twist, Richard Schmetterer said.

It didn’t take long to rent the space. The couple found a new tenant within days of posting an ad on Craigslist. “I got inundated with people looking,” Richard Schmetterer said.

A few lots down and across the road from the Schmetterers, business owner Janie Perry worked Friday morning inside The Vintage Marketplace, a new store where 15 vendors will sell antiques, vintage jewelry, home accessories, shabby chic furniture and vintage-inspired clothing, among other items, in the space formerly occupied by Premiere Lighting. The business opens Monday.

“I just think Oleander is a great location with all the other great shops like The Shop of Seagate, and it’s close to Wrightsville Beach,” Perry said, explaining one of the reasons why she chose to lease the 3,500-square-foot building at 5827 Oleander Drive. “It’s just a very up-and-coming area.”

A Dollar General is currently under construction at 5618 Oleander Drive, and in October, Urban Fitness moves from Lumina Commons to 5739 Oleander Drive. Urban Fitness owner Karon Tunis said she needed more space for her personal training and suspension gym, where people work out using equipment suspended from the ceiling. With 4,300 square feet, the new location has more than twice the space of her current facility, Tunis said.

Landfall Family Practice recently moved its medical offices to 5710 Oleander Drive, Suite 103, in the Oleander Business Center because of “an expanding patient base,” a news release said. And a new Port City Java opened at 5709 Oleander Drive in June.

Oleander Drive is one of the only corridors that has had the vacant space some businesses needed, said Garry Silivanch, one of the principals of Eastern Carolinas Commercial Real Estate, a new agency that recently moved in to 5129 Oleander Drive, Suite 103.

Vacancy rates in Wilmington’s midtown are down, according to research conducted by CoStar Group, one of the largest real estate technology firms in the U.S. that also tracks commercial transactions throughout metro Wilmington. In the midtown market, which includes Oleander Drive, vacant retail space decreased from 6.3 percent in the second quarter of 2013 to 3.4 percent during the same period this year.