Record Broken with 4,316 Housing Permits (Market Analysis)

The Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission collects building permit information to help estimate population and determine growth trends for transportation planning needs. Regional Planning Commission staff enters this collected data into a regional travel demand computer model that we plan to have operating sometime next year. This information, however, also provides useful data to the Northwest Arkansas business community for their planning purposes. For this reason we are happy to share our survey results in this column and on our Web site at www. nwarpc.com.

If you have been driving around in Northwest Arkansas lately you might guess that there has been more housing construction than ever before. The Northwest Arkansas Regional Development building permit survey confirms these informal observations. At the end of this year’s second quarter, our two-county area cities reported the permitting of 4,316 housing units. This breaks a first half-year record of 3,791 in 2003 by over 500 units. Rogers alone permitted 354 single-family housing units and 156 multifamily units in this year’s second quarter. This was a 221 percent increase from the same quarter in 2004. With all this activity, Rogers’ inspection staff has had a hard time just keeping up with the paperwork. In the second quarter, Fayetteville followed Rogers with 345 housing units while Bella Vista came in third with 253 single family units.

Although this is not a horse race, it is interesting to observe that the cities leading in residential construction usually change from one quarter to the next.

In the first quarter this year, Bentonville led with 556 housing units while Springdale closely followed with 519 units. The second quarter had Rogers and Fayetteville in the lead. This amount of residential construction is all good news for builders and businesses that supply new houses with washing machines, dishwashers and all kinds of durable goods. However, from an urban planner’s perspective this rapid growth rate means that cities will have a greater challenge in meeting public transportation and other infrastructure needs.