Southern Bancorp Buys Land for New Little Rock Branch

Southern Bancorp Bank of Arkadelphia has purchased 4.94 acres in southwest Little Rock that will become the home of the bank’s second Little Rock branch.

The bank bought a 0.23-acre parcel at 6109 Arbor Cove, a 0.31-acre parcel at 7102 Geyer Springs Road and a 4.4-acre parcel with frontage on Geyer Springs between 65th Street and Forbing Road. The bank purchased the properties for $500,000 from Cosme Rios of Manassas, Virginia.

The bank has one existing branch in Little Rock, at 3999 W. 12th St., which opened in 2023.

Southern Bancorp, which has 35 branches in Arkansas and 22 in Mississippi, is a community development financial institution, a federally certified subset of the banking industry that serves underserved communities.

The bank has $2.74 billion in assets and closed earlier this year on the purchase of Ozarks Heritage Financial Group Inc. of Gainesville, Missouri, which owns Legacy Bank & Trust, a CDFI in Mountain Grove, Missouri. Legacy Bank & Trust has $1.8 billion in assets and has a total of nine branches across Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas.