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New Residents in Northwest Arkansas Help Expand Market for New Apartments

2 min read

Last October, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced it was cutting jobs and laying off employees from its corporate headquarters in Bentonville.

Hidden in plain sight, however, was a statistic illustrating just how big Bentonville – the retailer’s home base – had grown.

The company said it was laying off 450 employees. That’s a large number of affected workers, but only 2.5 percent of the more than 18,000 employed there.

Again, that’s more than 18,000 who have a chair at Wal-Mart HQ in Bentonville alone. Sixteen years ago in the 2000 Census, the total population of Bentonville was 19,730.

In other words, in less than 20 years, Wal-Mart’s employee population has nearly matched that of the city it calls home.

It’s no surprise to see numbers showing Bentonville growing so fast. It’s one of the fastest growing cities in the state. Bentonville has more than doubled its population since 2000, reaching an estimated 41,613 in 2014. That’s a 78.9 percent jump over fourteen years. The recession didn’t slow down the growth either. From 2010 to 2014, Bentonville grew another 17.9 percent.

Bentonville and the other three major cities included in the U.S. Census Bureau’s metropolitan statistical area for northwest Arkansas* – Fayetteville, Springdale and Rogers – have all made enormous leaps in growth compared to the rest of the state. Each of those cities, plus Fort Smith, make up half of Arkansas’ top 10 list of most-populous cities.

Maybe that’s why Bentonville and the rest of northwest Arkansas need more apartments. That’s according to Kathy Deck, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

Pointing the Skyline Report published in March which said that vacancies in the region were at 3 percent for the second half of 2015, Deck said that “the extremely low vacancy rates seen throughout northwest Arkansas are sending strong signals to developers that there is demand for additional apartments.”

As vacancies drop, rent prices are increasing. In the second half of 2015, the average lease price per month for a multifamily property unit in northwest Arkansas increased to $601.43, while the median lease price increased to $550.00. “The increase in average prices is partly due to two factors,” Deck said. “The new units are on the higher end of the scale, and that the complexes are raising leases as they have tight vacancy rates.”

Northwest Arkansas’ growth is not slowing down. It’s a fact repeated in each year’s edition of the Arkansas Business Lease Guide for Northwest Arkansas, and probably any other professional reference book for the region. But even with the occasional jobs cut, the area is still making room for newcomers. It’s a natural fit as a land of opportunity.

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