I Said Seven Projects Would Finish in 2025. Two Did.

Two of the seven big projects I said would finish in 2025 actually finished in 2025. I opened that video by calling it "the prophecy year is finally here" — the year every big Northwest Arkansas project I'd been tracking since 2022 would land at once. I named seven, plus healthcare as a general category. It's now August 2026, so I can check all of it against what happened. Here's the scorecard, project by project, including the places I was wrong in ways that matter if you're planning a move around them.

The two that landed

Downtown Bentonville delivered. The Compton — the hotel I described as "the brand new hotel being built by the Waltons" — opened December 2, 2025. It's a 142-room, six-story, 116,000-square-foot independent hotel at 200 E. Central Avenue on the southeast corner of the square, developed by Runway Group and Blue Crane, the Tom and Steuart Walton ventures. I should have been more precise on camera: it's Sam Walton's grandsons, not "the Waltons" as an undifferentiated block.

And the Walmart Museum reopened on the square on March 14, 2025, back in the renovated historic Terry Block building with roughly double the exhibit space. That's two for two on downtown Bentonville.

That's the good news. The rest of the list needs revising.

Walmart Home Office: the acreage was right, the timing wasn't

I said "well over 300 acres" and "this is the year that Walmart headquarters officially opens up 100%." The acreage is right — 350 acres, about 2.4 million square feet of office space across twelve buildings.

The 100% is not. The grand opening was January 17, 2025, but that was a phased opening. The twelfth and final office building didn't open until January 12, 2026, and street-front retail was still rolling out into spring 2026. If you moved here in 2025 expecting a finished campus, you got most of one.

The trails claim holds up and is worth repeating: nearly seven miles of public trails run through the campus and connect to the Razorback Greenway. A corporate headquarters you can ride a bike through is genuinely unusual.

Two things I didn't mention that belong in an honest accounting. Walmart cut about 1,500 corporate jobs in 2025 across tech, advertising and e-commerce. That came after a 2024 return-to-office mandate that relocated remote staff to Bentonville. Some people moved here for a job and then lost it. That's part of the campus story too.

The Walmart-versus-Amazon framing was backwards

I said Walmart "got behind" Amazon, that the new headquarters would "catapult them over Amazon," and that "Amazon's creeping up and Walmart's, you know, not growing as fast."

Amazon isn't creeping up. In US e-commerce — the arena I was actually talking about — Amazon holds something on the order of 38% or more of the market depending on how you count, against Walmart's high single digits. That's not a competitor closing a gap. That's a market Amazon already dominates and Walmart is climbing into. On total company revenue the two are closer, roughly $717 billion for Amazon's FY2025 against Walmart's roughly $681 billion, though Amazon's figure includes AWS and isn't a clean retail comparison.

To be fair to what I actually said, I did use the word "reclaim," which concedes Walmart isn't currently on top. But the rest of the framing pointed the other way. The accurate version: Walmart is the challenger in e-commerce, growing online at a double-digit clip from a much smaller base. That's a real story and arguably a better one. It just isn't the one I told.

A campus also doesn't move market share. I connected those two things on camera and I shouldn't have.

The medical school: right on time, wrong on housing

This is the second clean hit. I said "this fall is the first wave of students," and the inaugural class of 48 began July 14, 2025. On schedule.

I also said the school offered "almost free tuition." It's fully free — for the first five cohorts, not almost. I undersold that one.

But I also said "free housing, they're building housing." The housing is real: a 300-unit complex on an adjacent 11-acre site, one building for students and one for the community, expected to open in 2026. I found nothing indicating it's free. It appears to be rental housing that happens to be next to campus.

That's a correction worth making loudly, because a prospective student who heard "free tuition and free housing" would budget very differently from one who heard "free tuition and convenient rentals." Assume you're paying rent.

Both highways slipped, and one lane count was wrong

This is the section I'd most want to update for anyone choosing where to live based on a commute.

Highway 612 / the Springdale Northern Bypass. I said it finishes in 2025. It didn't. The ribbon-cutting for Phase 2 plus the XNA Connector Road was set for September 4, 2026. And the full project is much bigger than I implied — roughly 21 miles and about $1 billion across four phases. Phase 1 opened back in 2018. Phase 3 was expected to start construction in 2026, and Phase 4 has funding but no completion date. The continuous route I described, connecting Interstate 49 through to US-412, is still years out.

I was right about the airport, though. The XNA Connector Road is a real four-mile, $127.7 million project that finally gives the airport a highway approach instead of the country road I complained about.

Highway 112. I said it was finishing in 2025 and being widened to "I think a five-lane, if I'm not mistaken." I was mistaken. It's going to four lanes with a center median, not five, and it's an 18-mile, roughly $500 million project split into eight separate segments running from Fayetteville up to Bentonville — not the Fayetteville-to-Springdale scope I described. The first segment's construction was starting in early 2026 with about 21 months of work ahead of it, which puts that one segment at late 2027.

The trail claim was right: a $25 million, federally funded 12-foot shared-use path runs the length of the project.

Crystal Bridges: my hedge was correct

This is the one where hedging saved me. I said "they're not sure if they're going to finish it in 2025 or 2026." It opened in June 2026 — 114,000 square feet, $150 million, designed by Safdie Architects.

I also said they were "almost doubling the size." The museum was around 210,000 square feet before, so 114,000 more is about a 54% increase. Substantial, but not almost double. And admission to the permanent collection is still free, which remains the genuinely remarkable part.

The parks: right names mostly, wrong year

The Quilt of Parks is a real program name — I had that right. It links six downtown Bentonville parks and spaces including Lawrence Plaza, Dave Peel Park, The Common and Town Branch Park, built in phases. I couldn't confirm all six phases finished in 2025, and the phased structure suggests they didn't.

The park I called "8th Street Park" is 8th Street Gateway Park. I guessed "50 or 100 acres" — it's 110, so my upper bound was close. It has about eight miles of trails, a two-mile beginner mountain bike trail, a one-acre playground, a three-acre great lawn, a 13,000-square-foot event plaza and a wheelsports garden skate park. It was still under construction into 2026 with a 2026 opening target. I said "I don't think they're going to finish it, but get very close," which was the right call.

Healthcare: none of the three finished

I named three and said the Mercy expansion "is going to be finished" and "the kids hospital expansion is going to be finished." Neither did.

Mercy's second-phase investment is about $500 million including a cancer center; site work started in July 2025 and it's targeted to be fully operational in July 2027. Arkansas Children's Northwest in Springdale — which I called "the Springdale Children's Hospital" — is an $82.7 million expansion adding 50,000 square feet and taking inpatient beds from 25 to 40, previewed in September 2025 and targeting late 2026. Highlands Oncology broke ground in June 2026 on a five-story, 125,000-square-foot cancer center in Rogers, opening in 2028.

To be fair to my past self, I did say "it's kind of hard to get details of when they're going to be finished." Then I named finish dates anyway. The hedge doesn't count if you ignore it in the next sentence.

One more number

I said XNA has "like 32 one-way stops across America." The real count of nonstop destinations looks closer to the mid-twenties across six airlines. The airport launched an incentive program in 2026 offering carriers upward of $800,000 to add service to Seattle, San Francisco, Boston and Austin — markets it still doesn't reach nonstop, which is itself evidence the number isn't 32.

What the scorecard actually says

Two of seven landed in 2025: downtown Bentonville and the medical school. Two more I hedged on correctly, Crystal Bridges and 8th Street Gateway Park, and both are landing about where my hedge said they would. Three slipped outright — the Walmart campus by a year, Highway 612 by at least one, Highway 112 by several. And none of the three healthcare projects I named finished.

That's not a great record, and I'd rather publish it than quietly let the video age.

What I'd still defend is the underlying read. Every one of these projects is real and none was cancelled. The hotel and the museum opened. The medical school enrolled. Crystal Bridges opened. The Walmart campus filled up in January 2026. The bypass segment that finally connects the airport to a highway has its ribbon-cutting on September 4, 2026 — days from now as I write this. What I got wrong was compression. I stacked a decade of construction into one calendar year because that made a better video.

If you're deciding when to move, the useful version is this: the transformation I described is happening on a five-year timeline, not a one-year one. That's slower than I promised and better for you, because it means you're not late.