Whisinvests District at Pinnacle Hills Takes Off

The first domino has fallen in the commercial development of a 54-acre site on the south side of the Pinnacle Hills area of Rogers.

On Jan. 29, Whisinvest Realty LLC of Little Rock officially broke ground on the first building to go vertical in The District at Pinnacle Hills, a multi-use development at the southwest corner of the intersection of southbound Interstate 49 and Pauline Whitaker Parkway.

A design rendering of the area shows 17 buildings, offering a mix of retail space (198,500 SF), class-A office space (134,650 SF), restaurant space (37,500 SF), as well as a 90-room hotel.

The initial construction, a 25,000-SF retail center at 4204 S. J.B. Hunt Drive, is next to a Walmart Neighborhood Market at 5000 W. Pauline Whitaker Parkway.

Burke Larkin, a senior vice president who heads up Whisinvest’s local office in Rogers, said that structure should be complete this summer, leading the way for a bevy of building in the coming months.

Larkin said The District could see construction activity on as many as four buildings in 2016.

“We feel like that building is the first domino, and our plans would be that the dominos would start to fall a lot faster than they have in the last few years,” Larkin said.

Four Years Later

In March 2012, Little Rock businessman Joe Whisenhunt made a multimillion-dollar investment in Benton County.

Whisenhunt, CEO of Whisenhunt Investment Group and one of the state’s wealthiest individuals, paid $19 million — in cash — for 375 acres of undeveloped land along the Interstate 49 corridor in Rogers and Lowell.

The transaction was made up of three separate deals involving Other Real Estate Owned in the portfolio of Bank of America.

The acreage encompassed land in the Pinnacle Hills, Pleasant Crossing and The Grove developments, allocated for projects that once belonged to groups that included Northwest Arkansas developers Gary Brandon, Charles Reaves, Bill Schwyhart and Robert Thornton.

Whisinvest — which is owned by the Whisenhunt Family Trust — has sold off some of the acreage it acquired to other entities. The company still controls the majority of the land — including roughly 175 acres south of Pleasant Grove Road, east of Interstate 49 in Rogers — with a diligent eye on future development.

At the time of the purchase, industry insiders said the transaction sent a clear signal that Whisenhunt, who was a key player in the growth and development of west Little Rock, believed the Northwest Arkansas market was well-positioned for growth, once the economic malaise eventually wore off.

Now almost four years later, after careful planning, the time for growth has apparently arrived, and the plans for The District signify Whisinvest’s most substantial building activity on any of its property holdings in Northwest Arkansas.

“We’ve been through the process with the city of Rogers, and they are great to work with,” Larkin said. “And we’ve been through platting and [Planned Unit Development] stuff, and we feel like now the time is right to go vertical in Pinnacle Hills on the retail and on the office.”

Coming to Life

Steve Cox, senior vice president of the Rogers-Lowell Area Chamber of Commerce, said the organization is pleased to see the Whisenvest development taking off.

“Any day we are breaking ground on new buildings is a great day,” Cox said. “We look forward to seeing this development come to life over the next few months and are excited about the new retail amenities coming for Rogers and all of Northwest Arkansas to enjoy.”

Construction of the initial shell building in The District is being led by Kinco Constructors LLC of Springdale, backed by a building permit valued at $3.04 million. Larkin said about one-third of the building is already leased to multiple tenants.

“We would like to turn over those spaces to tenants by July 15,” Larkin said.

Arvest Bank of Fayetteville is financing construction. Engineering consultants on the project include DCI of Fayetteville and Little Rock (civil engineering and landscape design) and HP Engineering of Rogers (mechanical, electrical and plumbing design).

Little Rock-based SCM Architects, which also has an office in Fayetteville, is handling the design work, led by Cody Ferris.

“We wanted to design a building that breaks away from the traditional flat-front façade,” Ferris said in describing the design. “The thought was to give each tenant some type of defined entryway, no matter where it is.”

Ferris further described the exterior as a mixture of brick and stone, with high-visibility frontage facing Pauline Whitaker Parkway. Tenant spaces are 80 feet deep, he said.

Both end caps are designed for restaurant tenants, and Larkin said there are leases pending for both spaces.

Soon to follow the shopping center, just to the east toward I-49, will be a 32,275-SF Class A office building, also designed by SCM.

Larkin said there is already strong interest from tenants. He also said it’s possible that Whisinvest could relocate its local office to approximately 1,000 SF in the new building. Whisinvest’s current Rogers address is less than one mile north on West Pinnacle Point Drive.

“But we’d love to lease the whole [building] up to other [tenants] and never have to go over there,” he added.

A third building in The District, a build-to-suit project for an undisclosed tenant, is also nearing construction on the hard southwest corner of South J.B. Hunt Drive and Pauline Whitaker Parkway. That building is less than 2,000 SF, Larkin said.