Eric Boen remembers when it used to be simple.
“The game has changed,” said Boen, a Fayetteville-based agent at Commercial Realty and founder of Boen Kemp Construction. “It went from what used to be Arkansas trying to get a Chick-fil-A to now there’s a lot of different things out there and so many different factors.”
Eric Boen
Commercial real estate in Arkansas has become an ever-growing — and ever-changing — endeavor. While northwest and central Arkansas continue to serve as primary hubs of development, there are few places in the state without some form of commercial growth. For those in charge of making those real estate deals happen, 2026 is a mixed bag of positive indicators mixed with strong feelings that things could be even better.
“We’ve never been more optimistic about what’s ahead,” said Jerry Halsey, founder, president and CEO of Halsey Real Estate.
Jerry Halsey
The numbers back that up. While office vacancies across the country hover right around 20 percent, vacancies in the northwest Arkansas region are holding at between 4 and 5 percent. Retail vacancies in the same area clock in closer to 3 percent, while similar vacancies in the state’s central region remain at about 5 percent. Industry has enjoyed a similar run, buoyed in part by the rapid growth of the steel industry in northeast Arkansas.
“The northeast Arkansas commercial market is simply not in the same place it was when I started in this business,” Halsey said. “The Jonesboro metro area has grown more than 28 percent since 2000, and that population growth has been matched — and, in some ways, outpaced — by commercial investment.”
It is not news to say that retail and office space across the country has taken a hit. Offices are still dealing with the fallout of COVID-19 as they face the fairly-recent prospect of employees working remotely. Retail faces its own set of challenges as more and more consumers opt to shop online.
Chris Moses, principal, president and CEO of Moses Tucker Partners, is one figure in the commercial real estate market who will not wave the white flag for retail just yet, pointing to the overall positive numbers for Arkansas.
Chris Moses
“I still think residents want community in life, and they’re not going to get community or the human connection online,” Moses said. “The retail centers create an environment for the wife to go to her spot, the husband to go to his spot and the kids to go to theirs. Outdoor centers that have a mix of uses, I think, will dominate.”
Moses’ take on shopping centers doubling as family activity centers represents a new way of looking at a long-static concept. Jessica Flake Dearnley, a principal broker at Flake & Co. in Little Rock, has the same view when it comes to office spaces. While it is true that on-site work versus remote work has been a pitched battle ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, Dearnley sees potential both in how people work and how people live.
Jessica Flake Dearnley
Her goal is to take that new thinking and apply it to downtown Little Rock and beyond.
“We’ve got so much to be concerned about in our capital city,” Dearnley said. “I still feel like a state is represented by a state capital, and the state capital is downtown.”
Dearnley sees potential in merging the commercial with the residential. While some former office workers will dig in their feet and push for working remotely no matter what, others are simply looking for everything they need being in a manageable range of travel. That helps explain the boom of apartment living and other facilities popping up near places that used to contain only offices and more offices.
“More office tenants are wanting to be closer to home or have more amenities nearby for their employees,” Dearnley said. “Times have changed since COVID, and getting people to the office, it’s like you’ve got to be doing lunches and have pickleball courts and hybrid workdays, and that’s changed things forever. My daughter works in Charlotte, and it’s pretty incredible what that city’s done. They’ve got all the financial institutions, but there is a whole area of town that is just booming with [apartments]. I mean, literally, no one who lives in all those apartments is over 25.”
Marshall Saviers is CEO and principal at Sage Partners, part of the worldwide commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. He also has been thinking young, especially as it relates to the continuing warp-speed growth of northwest Arkansas.
Marshall Saviers
“We have a lot of great young people in our company that are between 22 and 35,” Saviers said. “We skew a lot younger now, and I think that’s a testament to our market.”
That market is roaring right along.
“We have 40 people a day moving to northwest Arkansas,” Saviers said. “We used to worry a bit about how do we get 1 million people? Now, as a region, we’re going to get a million people. This is going to happen. It’s going to happen in the 2040s, most likely, so now we’ve got to focus on the infrastructure and how to accommodate that. The reason people want to move here is the quality of life. It’s here, but if they’re stuck in traffic every day, that quality of life is going to be affected.”
Boen is similarly bullish on the northwest Arkansas market but with a caveat: More can and should be done to spur growth not only in the state’s northwest corner but everywhere.
“Arkansas was way behind — and still really is behind — on the retail scene,” Boen said, “because if you look at all the states around us, one thing we lack is governing officials understanding that public infrastructure, and money needs to go into a lot of retail projects because every other state is doing it.”
So it is that retail growth in Arkansas could be decided not in a meeting room, but at the ballot box. Arkansans will vote in November on Issue 3, a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would allow for communities to create economic development districts. An economic development district is defined as a geographic area authorized to bring in and reinvest economic growth, growth that can be initiated via both property owners and government officials.
“Every other state around us, if the city of Jackson, Mississippi, or Tulsa, Oklahoma, would like to get a Trader Joe’s or a Whole Foods, they can shell out money to the developer to incentivize those people to get this stuff done,” Boen said. “Right now, it’s not legal in the state of Arkansas. We are so far behind the eight ball that until we get that passed, we are not on a level playing field.”
Dearnley agreed that Issue 3 could be a catalyst for growth.
“Whenever the word ‘incentive’ is used, it might mean or imply that, to incentivize developers, they think the developers are getting more money,” Dearnley said, “and that’s not necessarily the case. One of the examples is getting grocers to small towns, and a small town, they need something to offer.”
Take away the monetary aspect, and commercial real estate boils down to sparking growth — and not just in the biggest cities. With businesses popping up all over the state, progress is not limited to only a lucky handful of areas.
“What we do isn’t transactional at its core,” Halsey said. “It’s all relational. When you’ve watched a region grow for decades, when you’ve been through recessions and tornadoes and a pandemic and come out on the other side with your relationships and your reputation intact, you develop a different connection to the market.”
SEE THE ARTICLE BELOW AND IN OUR JUNE 2026 ISSUE OF AMP MAGAZINE
READ ALSO: Four Arkansas Small Towns on the Brink of Big Things
