Area Offers Availability On Retail/Office Leases

• Click here for a look at the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal’s Office/Retail Lease Guide, click here.

• Click here for the lease company directory.

A sort by city of the data collected for the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal’s 2006 Commercial Lease Guide shows a trend that’s been consistently reported lately.

There’s plenty of available office/retail lease space on the market in Northwest Arkansas — particularly in Bentonville where 51.6 percent of reported office/retail space remains available.

The Business Journal’s report includes finished properties and those under construction by June 1. The sampling only includes data for firms that responded to the publication’s annual survey, which this year was an estimated 70 percent.

The Bentonville number is down slightly from the same list a year earlier, however, which showed that 55.5 percent of the gross SF in Bentonville was available.

But Bentonville’s gross space increased by 1,321,770 SF, according to the firms that responded to the survey, indicating that new space that became available during the year was leased at a comparable rate.

According to the list, there is a total of 5,838,707 SF of office/retail space in Northwest Arkansas, up 19 percent from a year prior. The available-for-lease percentage increased from 33.5 percent in 2005 to a whopping 41 percent on this year’s list.

The total SF available increased from 1,642,552 SF in 2005 to 2,392,136 SF on this year’s list.

The area’s trend is to build in smaller adjacent cities such as Lowell, Johnson, Centerton and Tontitown. Data from those cities are spotty, so the Business Journal deemed them incomplete for this comparison.

Springdale had a 17.6 percent available rate of retail/office space, indicating good absorption rates for that city, considering its reported available rate was 41.1 percent in 2005.

Springdale’s gross SF increased year over year from 920,173 SF to 1,085,076 SF, according to the responding firms.

The Bentonville numbers are supported by recent data from the Skyline Report’s first quarter commercial real estate summary.

The Skyline Report is a study of area real estate compiled by the Center for Business & Economic Research at the University of Arkansas’ Walton College of Business. The report is sponsored by Bentonville-based Arvest Bank Group Inc.

According to the report, Bentonville’s vacancy rates declined first quarter 2005 to first quarter 2006 in all of its submarkets, which include: office, medical office, office/retail, office/warehouse, retail and warehouse. The report also said:

• In the first quarter of 2006, 188,876 SF of competitive commercial property was added to the Northwest Arkansas market.

• Vacancy rates were up from 16 percent to 16.7 percent in the Northwest Arkansas office submarket.

• The availability of warehouse space continued to decline as almost 100,000 SF were absorbed in the first quarter.

• Building permits totaling $106.8 million were issued in Northwest Arkansas in the first quarter, an increase of 88 percent from a year prior.