NWA boom leads to tight, but healthy commercial real estate market
by February 16, 2025 8:06 am 1,617 views
Marshall Saviers, CEO of Cushman & Wakefield | Sage Partners, one of the largest commercial real estate firms in the state, says the Northwest Arkansas market is in a pretty healthy place right now, but the pace of growth will require focus.
His company recently released its quarterly market analysis, which shows that commercial vacancies across the board are lower than they’ve ever been in all major sectors.
“You know, there is a constraint on building because it’s just so expensive to build that it’s hard for folks to make it pencil on the rate side. That means the buildings that are there and available seem to go fairly quickly,” said Saviers. “I’ve been here 20 years and we’ve never had vacancy rates this low across the board. There might be one sector or another that have lower vacancy rates, but not all at the same time.”
Saviers noted the health of the industrial and warehouse space, office space, and retail space, while forecasting that the addition of 1,000 people to the region per month will continue to constrain new construction and renovation of existing properties. One of the biggest challenges is simply finding companies and labor to complete the work.
“It will help that the Walmart campus is nearing completion. That is certainly a boom for the area and we’re so glad that they did it, but it also made a labor strain as well,” he said. “So that’s going to free up some labor.”
“On the flip side, we had more commercial building permits that went through the first half of last year than have ever gone through – over $400 million. It’s a little bit contrarian to what I just said of folks having trouble building, but a lot of those are user-driven and that number excludes Walmart itself,” he added.
While Saviers’ expertise centers on commercial real estate, he acknowledges that residential housing – new construction and existing home sales – is crucial to continued growth in Northwest Arkansas.
“We need more housing. Bottom line,” he said. “We need a lot more housing that can be built in an affordable and dense manner.”
“I’m really involved with the Northwest Arkansas Council and that’s something that we’re trying to help solve through our groundwork initiative… more dense housing, more urban communities, not just sprawl because it puts a strain on all kinds of infrastructure, which is something we’re going to need to solve in Northwest Arkansas. But it’s also just a better place to live when you can walk and bike and get to work and get to where you want to go. Hopefully, we’re headed that way, but it’s going to be a really big lift for the region.”
You can watch Saviers’ full interview in the video below.