Bentonville growth a boon for its real estate market

Bentonville, Arkansas, has been experiencing major growth in recent years.

The population of the city stood at 59,471 in 2023, representing a 2.7% increase from the prior year and 9.8% jump from 2020, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Bentonville is located in Northwestern Arkansas, a fast-growing region where companies like Walmart, J.B. Hunt and Tyson Foods all have their headquarters.

A forecast from the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission suggested over 1 million could call Northwest Arkansas home by 2050. 

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Bentonville’s real estate market has become a hot spot alongside the city’s growth.

Pedestrians with bicycles at the main downtown square in Bentonville, Arkansas, US, on Monday, Nov. 21, 2022. In the spring of 2022, Walmart Inc. created a new position, called director of workplace mobility, with a very specific task: Figure out how (Terra Fondriest/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

“We’re the home of Walmart, and we’re the home of J.B. Hunt and also the home of Tyson, and Walmart has spent a ton of energy in making this a very recruitable place,” The Agency Bentonville Managing Partner Kaala House told FOX Business. “Our market is growing so intensely, especially starting after COVID because a lot of people wanted to get out of the city where they could be outside and things like that. We have become, in the last couple years, we’ve become the mountain biking capital of the United States in Bella Vista. And so that’s making us extremely recruitable for Walmart, who’s bringing back their employees as well.”

The real estate market around Bentonville has seen an 8.5% increase in home sales in the first half of 2024 from a year ago, The Agency Bentonville agent Katlyn Munch said.

Benton County, where Bentonville is located, and two nearby counties notched 4,799 home sales over the first six months of the year, according to a recent Skyline Report from Arvest Bank and the University of Arkansas published online by NWAHomepage. 

That figure represented a 2.7% rise from the latter half of 2023, the report found.

Munch also noted 39.5% of all homes sold were new construction.

“We’re at an all-low inventory rate. There’s a lot of people that are holding on to that COVID two-point interest rate, and so we’ve got a lot of people that are holding their homes that they don’t want to sell because they have such a great rate, and then the prices have gone up so much since that time too,” House said. “So we have a lot of new construction inventory right now. I think the average was, if we closed 29 new houses a day, we wouldn’t have enough houses, because we average 37 people-a-day increase in population.”

Bentonville has “a little bit more” of a buyer’s market at the moment, she said, citing interest rates, the upcoming election and other factors.

The Agency Bentonville experts credited Walmart…