Lease Guide Cut to 241 Commercial Listings

For the first time since it began publishing in 1997, the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal has relied on a single outside source for the information compiled in its annual Office/Retail Lease Guide.

The guide, available by clicking here, has served as the most up-to-date list of commercial properties, their occupancy, services and lease rates available in Northwest Arkansas. But this year the Business Journal entered an agreement with Xceligent Inc. of Independence, Mo., whereby its local affiliate, the Northwest Arkansas Commercial Data Exchange, provided its database of commercial listings for the base research.

 The result is the most comprehensive listing of commercial real estate ever compiled and published in the Northwest Arkansas market. The Commercial Data Exchange, which is essentially made up of the community of commercial Realtors in the market, provided the Business Journal with raw data on 742 office, retail and industrial listings located everywhere from Barling to Bella Vista.

There were so many commercial listings, it was prohibitive to publish them all. After culling out industrial listings, those with incomplete information, duplicates, and listings outside Benton and Washington counties, the editors decided to dedicate 10 full pages of this publication to the guide, the same number of pages published last year. That’s the reason for what looks like an arbitrary cut-off of 241 listings. The listings are ranked by each property’s gross square footage.

Other commercial properties in both Northwest Arkansas and central Arkansas can be researched at www.arkansasbusiness.com/real_estate.asp.

According to this year’s guide, those top 241 office and retail properties have a combined 7.19 million SF of space, 65 percent of which is occupied. That leaves about 2.53 million SF vacant.

Of those listings, 140 are classified as office space. There are 3.54 million SF of office space, and about 61 percent of that is occupied.

The remaining space – some 3.65 million SF – is classified as retail, which is about 69 percent occupied.

By city, Fayetteville had the most office and retail space with 2.18 million SF, or about 32 percent of the total available in the four largest cities in the market.

Bentonville and Rogers are neck and neck, with 1.82 million SF and 1.83 million SF, respectively. But Bentonville has more than 100,000 SF of vacant space than Rogers.

Colliers International had the most number of listings with 49 total, representing 1.24 million SF of space.

Colliers broker Butch Gurganus had the largest number of listings, at 34 total, but Rick Oliver of Mathias Properties represents more gross SF, a total of 721,399.