Arvest Sponsors the Skyline Report. It Doesn't Write It.

Arvest sponsors the Skyline Report. The University of Arkansas writes it. In this video I said it was "created by Arvest Bank" and that "they partner with University of Arkansas and Arvest Bank put this together," which gets the primacy backwards — and it matters, because the whole reason to trust the thing is that a bank isn't the one producing the numbers.

The report is researched and produced by the Center for Business and Economic Research at the Sam M. Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas. Arvest sponsors it and releases it. CBER's director is Mervin Jebaraj, and it's his name and his shop on the analysis. It's been running since 2004 and marked its twentieth anniversary with the very edition I was reading.

The Walton quiz bit was right. I asked "who owns Arvest Bank? If you guessed the Waltons, you'd be correct," and that checks out — Arvest is majority-owned by the Walton family and Jim Walton is chairman. Sam and Helen Walton bought the Bank of Bentonville in 1961 and built it from there.

I hedged the size claim — "the biggest bank in Arkansas I'm pretty sure at the moment" — and the hedge was warranted, because it depends on what you count. Arvest leads on Arkansas deposits and branch count. On total assets, Bank OZK in Little Rock is bigger, roughly $40.8 billion at the end of 2025 against Arvest's $27 billion or so. Bank OZK's book is heavily out-of-state lending, which is why the two measures disagree.

Everything else here is good news, sort of: the headline numbers I read out are right. It's the frame around them that needs work, and the picture has since inverted.

Which report this was

Worth pinning down, because every number in the video is dated. The 8.5% home sales figure, the $400 million in commercial permits, the $700,000 Walmart figure and the 6.4% vacancy rate all come from one edition: the First Half 2024 Skyline Report, released September 2024.

So when I say "so far this year," I mean the first six months of 2024. Two years ago now.

The numbers I got right

Home sales up 8.5%. Exactly right. 4,799 homes sold across Benton and Washington counties in the first half of 2024, against 4,422 in the same period of 2023. And a detail I'd have enjoyed: a record 1,896 of those — 39.5% — were new construction.

I also caught myself on air rounding it, saying "that tells me we're almost 10% growth every single year," then immediately correcting to "now that 10%, that 8% — 8.5%, let me be accurate." Good instinct, and I'll take the credit since I'm handing out demerits elsewhere.

The caveat I volunteered was fair too — that "8.5% is also people switching around," meaning internal moves rather than pure in-migration. That's a real limitation of a sales-volume number and I was right to flag it.

$406.1 million in commercial permits. I said "$400 million." Close enough.

$700,000 toward Walmart. Confirmed, and this is genuinely the most interesting number in the report. I said "you're thinking, oh, it's probably a lot of Walmart. No, no, no." Correct. In a half-year with $406 million in commercial permitting, Walmart-related permits were seven hundred thousand dollars. The construction boom was almost entirely other people.

6.4% commercial vacancy. Right for that edition — office 7.4%, retail 6.2%, warehouse 8.0%, with 538,455 square feet of new leasable space absorbed.

The permit math, which I mangled live

Here I need to correct myself against myself. In the space of one segment I gave three different prior-year figures: first "last year it was at $280 million," then moments later "last year was 230 million or $250 million." And I computed "almost a 50% increase."

My first number was the right one. The prior period was $287.6 million. Against $406.1 million that's an increase of $118.5 million, or 41.2%.

So I talked myself out of the correct figure and into a wrong percentage. Forty-one percent is a big jump. It didn't need rounding up.

I also hedged the year-end total: "this year is coming to an end, so it might be 450 by the end of the year." It didn't go that way at all. Second-half 2024 commercial permits came in at $195.7 million, down about 52% from the first-half peak. The spike I was extrapolating from was the top.

My vacancy benchmark was an office number

This is the biggest analytical error in the video, and it's the kind that's easy to make and hard to notice.

I said: "if you were in a normal regular area in America, a 14 to 16, sometimes 18% vacancy rate is pretty normal... anything below 14% is like, we're doing really good."

There is no single national commercial vacancy rate. The three sectors are nowhere near each other, and my range describes exactly one of them:

• Office — the only sector in my range. US office vacancy ran around 19% in late 2024, peaking near 20%, and sits at 18.3% in mid-2026.
• Retail — national availability hit a record low around 4.6% in 2024 and is about 4.9% now. That's a third of the number I called "really good."
• Industrial — about 6.5% currently, mid-single digits through 2024.

So comparing Northwest Arkansas's all-commercial 6.4% against an 18% benchmark is comparing a blended rate to an office rate. Retail and industrial were tight everywhere in the country; we weren't special on those.

The comparison that does support my point is the one I didn't make: Northwest Arkansas office vacancy at 7.4% in that report, against roughly 19% nationally. That's the genuinely remarkable number, and it's a much stronger version of the argument than the one I gave.

Two things I said that I can't source

"They said it's drool worthy. It's an investor's dream, a developer's dream." I attributed this to coverage of the report. I can't find any trade press describing the Northwest Arkansas commercial market in those terms. The language CBER and the outlets covering it actually use is deliberately flat — "balanced and healthy," later "remarkably healthy." The color was mine, and I put it in someone else's mouth.

"Maybe about 3 or 4 months ago there's an article that came out that Northwest Arkansas per capita was like the best industrial building place because of the low vacancy rate." I hedged the timing, which helps, but I can't find this ranking from any of the national brokerages or trade outlets. The nearest real thing is a local brokerage describing Northwest Arkansas as one of the most supplier-dense industrial markets per capita in the country — driven by Walmart, Tyson and J.B. Hunt supplier and third-party-logistics demand. That's a density observation, not a construction ranking, and the same source notes industrial construction was at a ten-year low on capital costs. I think I half-remembered that. It isn't what I said.

Austin corrected. The others mostly didn't.

I listed "Austin taking a huge dip, Boulder, Golden... Nashville and other places that exploded housing-wise" as all seeing "a major decline in the last couple years."

Austin genuinely did — the median peaked around $564,000 in May 2022 and has fallen roughly 24.5%. But I generalized from the outlier:

• Boulder — average home value around $971,300, down about 1.5% year over year.
• Golden — around $869,400, down under 1%, and the sources genuinely conflict; one measure shows it up 6.6%. Small-market noise.
• Nashville — median around $538,000, down about 1%, with some measures showing it slightly up. Essentially flat.

So the honest version: one metro corrected hard, and three others flattened or dipped a point or two. "Major decline" across the group isn't what happened.

What the report says now, which is a different story

The reason to revisit this isn't just the errors. It's that the market I was describing has turned.

Per the First Half 2026 Skyline Report, released this month:

• Home sales: 5,241, up 3.8% over the prior year. Still growing — but that 8.5% I was reading became 14.2% in the very next edition after mine, and has now settled to under 4%.
• Benton County average price $465,888, down 1.2%. Washington County $423,750, up 1.5%.
• Commercial vacancy 7.6%, up from 7.2% a year earlier — office 8.1%, warehouse 9.7%, retail 6.0%. Retail is the only sector improving.

The full arc on vacancy since my video: 6.4% in the report I was reading, 5.8% in the next one — the first time below 6% since 2022 — then 7.2%, then 6.3%, now 7.6%. I said we'd "been consistently at 6.4% for so long." Measured from the number I quoted, it dropped six tenths and then climbed one-point-two — a range of nearly two points inside two years.

And CBER's own characterization has shifted. Jebaraj now says that for the first time in years he'd describe Northwest Arkansas as more of a buyer's market than a seller's market.

The thing I said that I'd most defend

"The data itself is invaluable, because a lot of other areas in America don't do this. The one thing that's very unique about Northwest Arkansas is they are hyperfocused on data, and in a good way."

I stand by that completely, and this post is a decent argument for it. A metro of 620,000 people has had a university research center publishing residential, multifamily and commercial data twice a year since 2004. That's why I can date my own errors to a specific edition, show you exactly which half-year the permit spike topped out, and tell you the market has since flipped.

Most places, none of that would be checkable. Here it is — including when the person doing the talking is me.