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Pinnacle Hills Thrives as ‘Downtown’ of Northwest ArkansasLock Icon

5 min read

Laurice Hachem just wanted to dip her toe into the northwest Arkansas real estate market, but she found Pinnacle Hills in Rogers too enticing to resist.

Hachem is no stranger to big deals and elite portfolios, having built a real estate empire in Tampa, Florida, with her late husband, Sam. A year after his death in 2016, Laurice Hachem came to Arkansas looking for a quieter place to plan her retirement.

Instead, she bought two $1 million homes, 21 acres of prime real estate and a shopping center in the Pinnacle Hills area.

“If you had told me 10 years ago that I would start investing in northwest Arkansas, I would have said, ‘What are you talking about?’” Hachem said. “After coming here for 10 days, I could see the potential in the area. I just thought I would buy a couple of buildings, get something to dabble in and sit back and relax.”

Pinnacle Hills remains irresistible years after it first rose to prominence as the backbone of Benton County’s fabled Billion-Dollar Mile. In recent years, investment and developments have re-emerged in Pinnacle with several multimillion-dollar developments under construction or in the planning stages.

“Every day it is exciting to look out the window and see what else is going on,” said Tom Allen, executive vice president of Cushman & Wakefield-Sage Partners in Rogers.

Allen is overseeing the construction of Pinnacle Heights, a 13-acre $100 million project just south of his office on the eighth floor of the Hunt Tower. Pinnacle Heights will have a boutique hotel, approximately 300 apartment units and 30,000 SF of retail and restaurants.

The property is owned by a partnership between Hunt Ventures, led by Johnelle Hunt and her Oklahoma City partners, Andy and David Burnett. Allen expects it to be completed by October 2020, and he says companies are already lining up to reserve a space.

Just across Pauline Whitaker Parkway is 1 Uptown, a three-story multiuse building that Hachem expects to be completed by next summer. It will combine retail and office space with two rooftop restaurants.

Alex Blass, like Allen a principal at Cushman & Wakefield-Sage Partners, is developing Pinnacle Village, a similar project to Pinnacle Heights but on 27 acres south of the Walmart Neighborhood Market on Pauline Whitaker Parkway.

Everyone’s Downtown

Blass said Pinnacle Hills is thriving as a “true urban” community that is being billed as the downtown for northwest Arkansas.

“The Bentonville Square and Pinnacle Hills are the hottest areas,” Blass said.

Pinnacle Hills has the real estate investor’s dream advantage of its location on Interstate 49 in the middle of the big four cities of the region. The downtown areas of Bentonville, Springdale and Fayetteville — all growing areas — are less accessible to visitors.

“The long play has been, strategically, it is located physically and geographically with I-49 and the most densely populated retail shopping with the Promenade Mall,” Allen said. “There is the accessibility with a lot of labor supply where a lot of people who live to the west and the southwest — really all around — they don’t want to travel too far. We hear, ‘It’s nice to not have to go all the way into Rogers.’”

Hachem puts it succinctly: “Every real estate developer understands the three L’s: location, location, location. This area is really becoming what Arkansas is all about.”

Pinnacle Hills made its first big splashes in the years before the recession. Mercy Hospital and the Promenade Mall opened for business east of the interstate while John Q. Hammons opened the Embassy Suites hotel and Convention Center to the west.

Things slowed down when the recession hit. Joe Whisenhunt of Little Rock helped refocus attention on Pinnacle Hills in 2012 when he paid $19 million for 375 acres, of which 63 acres were in Pinnacle Hills. Soon after, his company Whisinvest Realty began developing The District at Pinnacle Hills on 55 acres next to the Walmart.

“It went as well as we thought it would but it went faster,” said Burke Larkin, senior vice president at Whisinvest. “We basically built 45,000 feet of retail and 75,000 feet of office space and for the most part we have no space left.”

Work & Play

Larkin said Whisinvest is finishing up The District with a couple more multiuse buildings on which construction will soon start. After that, Whisinvest will be mostly done in the immediate Pinnacle Hills area.

“I think it took us — not that people were waiting on us — but once we started on that big piece on the south end, they felt more confident about the rest of the investment in ground in Pinnacle,” Larkin said. “Once people decided people were going to office in south Rogers, it opened up everything for what we have done, the Hunts have done and what Laurice is doing.”

Among the other developments in Pinnacle Hills are an assisted living complex and a Topgolf entertainment center that will combine golf with food and fun.

The Topgolf site is next to the Walmart Arkansas Music Pavilion and is the kind of entertainment amenity urban areas need, Allen said.

“The area that we are starting to kick into gear is entertainment,” Allen said. “Topgolf is a great entertainment concept. People ask, ‘What are we going to do after we eat dinner — go home and go to bed? I’d like to stay up and do something different.’”

Pinnacle Heights and Pinnacle Village will both have bike and walking trails amid their residential and restaurant spaces. In the new age of development, such open areas are crucial even in Pinnacle Hills, where space is such a precious and finite commodity.

“If you go to other markets that is what they have that we don’t have,” Allen said. “There is a resistance traditionally because with a blade of grass there is no direct correlation to making money. To differentiate yourself to get people to locate here you have to have the amenities and quality of life. It’s more than having the restaurants and service-related retail.

“What it does is build value in the real estate that you do rent out and do sell. It’s a balance. It has to be enough to make a difference.”

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