Coldwell Banker Village Communities

It was 1966 and Carroll Caldwell needed a job. Developer John Cooper was building the first retirement community in the United States, a town called Cherokee Village that spanned into Fulton and Sharp counties, in the Ozark foothills.

Caldwell went to work in construction earning 75-cents per hour.

He was eventually promoted to real estate sales and not long after he took a sales job in Tennessee. A year later he and two other developers, Marvin Hinton and Ray Pierson, started what would become Coldwell Banker Village Communities.

“Coldwell Banker Village Communities is a premier and experienced real estate company that has been a leader in our market for more than 50 years,” Caldwell said. “We specialize in the brokerage of all classes of real estate and property development. I started Village Communities Real Estate in 1974, franchised with Coldwell Banker in 2004, and have never had a bad year in business. Our agents have been in the real estate profession for their entire careers, so we have a wide range of expertise and unlimited knowledge in the real estate industry.”

The company still has three owners including Caldwell, but he has two new partners, Kevin Kercheval and Eric Clark. Kercheval has worked at Coldwell since 2002, and Clark joined in 2005. They bought out Hinton and Pierson in 2016.

Five people with experience as brokers work for the company and it has 82 licensed agents, Clark said. Hinton and Pierson remain on the sales team. Jonesboro’s steady population growth, low cost of living, and unique jobs base make it more recession resistant than a lot of cities in the region, Kercheval said. The city has morphed from a small town to a regional hub in the last several decades.

Through the years, the company evolved and now sells a mix of residential, commercial, and agriculture properties. As interest rates fluctuated, the strategies behind targeting customers had to change, Caldwell said.

For instance, in the early 1980s interest rates were higher than 20%. That meant people who already had money in the bank were making 15% interest on that money so the company had to go after that type of customer, he said.

During the company’s 50 years in operation, there’s only been one instance that the market turned from a “buyer’s market” to a “seller’s market” and it started as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in March 2020. Kercheval said the seller’s market lasted until about mid-2022, when inflation and interest rates began to spike.

The Southern Hills development is the latest project connected to Coldwell Banker. It’s a 175-acre, mixed-use development off Southwest Drive that will include 175 homes and 20 to 30 businesses, Caldwell said. 

Editor’s note: This company is a finalist for the Northeast Arkansas Outstanding Business Awards — Large Business category. Winners will be announced at a luncheon on April 15. Contact Rob Gutterridge at rgutterridge@nwabj.com for tickets.