Back in 1997, when Facebook was years in the future and tweets were sounds made by birds, Bob Sanders and a team of six digital pioneers introduced e-government to Arkansas.

A few Arkansans with internet connections — dial-up, at that time — slowly began doing business with state and local governments online.

Now the public-private partnership that Sanders helped create, Information Network of Arkansas, is celebrating its 20th anniversary and is still setting records. It logged 2.2 million transactions and processed $377 million in digital payments in 2016, handling everything from car tag renewals to criminal background checks to applications for government jobs.

Those transactions, both financial and nonfinancial, saved the state an estimated $19 million and spared citizens countless hours of waiting in line. The Arkansas.gov portal run by INA has also made the state a national leader in digital government, serving more than 240 government entities.

Arkansans can pay their property taxes online in 54 counties, for example, while businesses statewide pay franchise taxes, register corporations and gain access to the state procurement system digitally, all without paper and increasingly on mobile phones.

“We have over 800 websites and services that we maintain in partnership with the state, and all of it is self-funded,” said Sanders, the general manager at INA. User fees of a few dollars per transaction pay for the services and provide a profit to INA’s private partner company, Arkansas Information Consortium. AIC is a wholly owned subsidiary of NIC Inc. of Kansas, a publicly traded company operating in 29 states.

“This is a true zero-dollar contract to the state,” Sanders said. “We are supported by fees that users pay, and online services give citizens back their most valuable asset, time.”

A business handling franchise taxes online, for example, will pay about $3 to use an electronic check, or about 3 percent of its tax total if using a credit card. “For tag renewals, the state absorbs the fees so that citizens don’t pay extra.”

INA has grown from seven people to about 40, working in offices on West Capitol Avenue in Little Rock. Arkansas Information Consortium has received payments of just over $3 million from state entities this fiscal year, according to Transparency.Arkansas.gov.

INA’s parent company, NIC, reported 2016 revenue of $318 million, up 9 percent from the year before. Its operating profit was $78 million, up 11 percent.

Convenience, Efficiency

Mark Martin, the Arkansas secretary of state and chairman of the INA governing board, said many Arkansans happily “pay the fees because of the convenience of it,” but he said nondigital methods still exist.

“We have to remain sensitive to people who haven’t moved to a web-based lifestyle,” he said.

Martin said e-government helped his office resolve a huge backlog of corporation filings and franchise tax collections. “The filings and franchise payments were stacked up a couple of months when I came into office [in January 2011], and we were able to eliminate that. We could do things efficiently.”

Accountant Sherry Chesser of Thomas & Thomas LP in Little Rock said the online form for paying franchise taxes is clear and simple, and that many businesses that once asked outside accountants to handle payments now do it themselves.

“I encourage everyone to do it online,” Chesser told Arkansas Business. “Years ago, accountants pretty much did it, but businesses can handle it now.”

Sanders also emphasized cost advantages, citing a 2013 Utah study that found savings of about $13 for government “any time somebody does something online versus on paper.”

Businesses also save, but the benefits go deeper, said David Beck, vice president and marketing director of First Arkansas Insurance in Pine Bluff.

“Online services take a lot of the guesswork out of doing business with government,” Beck said. “Paying franchise taxes online, for example, is easier because the system walks you through the steps and calculates how much you owe. The paper form requires you to understand all that yourself.”

Beck also said Arkansas offers online professional licensing for dozens of professions, including nursing, teaching and insurance. “Most licensing boards put all of their information is online now, including rules, regulations and notifications of public meetings.”

Making Information Public

E-government goes beyond helping citizens fill out forms or renew their vehicle tags through ARstar.com, probably the most familiar service, Sanders said. It is also a channel for getting information to the public.

Transparency.Arkansas.gov provides citizens access to thousands of documents on state transactions, government salaries and much more. Created by the state Legislature in 2011, the site offers searchable details on revenue, expenditures and government contracts.

In 2010, the Office of State Procurement introduced an electronic workflow process that it estimated cut paper use by 117,000 pages a year and reduced processing time for government contracts, which average more than 2,000 a year, from three months to six weeks.

The new system allows businesses and agencies to access contract information online, then download documents and spreadsheets.

E-government advances have also eased life for municipal and county workers, who can research ordinances or procedures used in other localities on databases available 24 hours a day. Scanning and emailing documents saves on courier services and long-distance charges for faxing.

Martin says he has also been able to shift his office’s focus from “gotcha” enforcement to helping businesses comply with state regulations. “I have a quip about that, that we’re assisting in compliance rather than persisting in enforcement,” he said.

“Ultimately we’re making Arkansas a much more business-friendly state. Our businesses aren’t criminals. When they’re out of compliance it’s not because they’re trying to get away with things. It’s because the burden has been difficult.”

Martin said he uses the state’s mobile application, Gov2Go, to get alerts when property tax payments come due. “It’s a great help when an owner has multiple properties. Again, this helps Arkansans comply with what they need to do.”

‘Best in Nation’

Innovations like Gov2Go have helped Arkansas build a reputation for e-government. INA won a 2017 Digital Edge 50 award for the app, which Martin describes as the nation’s first personal digital government assistant. Other winners for technical innovation this year included Accenture, FedEx, Cisco Systems, Monsanto, Pfizer and Verizon.

“The state has been in the top 10 in the Center for Digital Government’s Best of the Web competition every year for the last decade,” Martin said, citing 54 national awards and “best in nation” rankings in 2011 and 2015. “It surprises a lot of people that Arkansas does that well in digital government, but we’re really seen as a national leader.”

Arkansans expressed privacy concerns in the early years and were sometimes reluctant to provide their credit card information, but Martin said those worries have eased.

“There’s a lot of diligence and work that goes into maintaining people’s privacy,” he said. “I think people are exposing a lot more of their privacy on Facebook every day.”

Martin envisions a day when digital government will offer Arkansans “more of a one stop” where businesses “don’t have to get with 50 jillion agencies” to get information and conduct transactions.

“They’d be able to do the work from a website in only one place, and get their business substantially completed,” he said. “The vision is a place where we’re not filling out dozens of paperwork forms over and over, and we can coordinate from one agency to another and begin to unify this into a single experience. We want to be consistent, reliably the same, and to make sure what we’re doing is making things easier, not more difficult, for businesses.”

The Atlantic published an interesting article online last week called “What in the World Is Causing the Retail Meltdown of 2017?” The subtitle to Derek Thompson’s well-researched report assures us that “the reasons why go far beyond Amazon.”

Those of us who follow Arkansas businesses closely are certainly aware that our homegrown retailers have had a hard time of it. Dillard’s has had six straight quarters of declining same-store sales in its department stores. Wal-Mart’s domestic sales are inching upward, but it has spent years and billions of dollars off the bottom line trying to figure out the key to online sales, and it is still reporting its e-commerce results in terms of percent growth rather than dollar signs. (The industry analyst eMarketer estimates Wal-Mart’s e-commerce sales in 2016 at $14.4 billion, which is less than 3 percent of its total revenue and less than a sixth of Amazon’s comparable figure.)

But Wal-Mart and Dillard’s aren’t the retailers that are really on the ropes.

“There have been nine retail bankruptcies in 2017 — as many as all of 2016. J.C. Penney, RadioShack, Macy’s, and Sears have each announced more than 100 store closures. Sports Authority has liquidated, and Payless has filed for bankruptcy,” Thompson ticked off.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s sales in North America “quintupled from $16 billion to $80 billion” between 2010 and 2016, which Thompson put in meaningful context by pointing out that “Sears’ revenue last year was about $22 billion, so you could say Amazon has grown by three Sears in six years.”

But, as promised in the subtitle, Thompson explained that online competition isn’t the only change in the retail landscape. Many stores are closing because the malls that surround them just aren’t attracting the kind of traffic they used to. (Here’s how William Dillard II put it in February: “Our operating results reflect another quarter of mall traffic declines from continued retail industry challenges.”)

Now, it seems obvious that this would be related to the rise of online shopping — more shopping done from smartphone or laptop means less done at the mall. But Thompson argues that the impact of online shopping has been compounded because “America built way too many malls” in the first place — 40 percent more “gross leasable area” in shopping centers per capita than Canada, five times more than England and 10 times more than Germany. Excess capacity becomes a burden really fast when mall traffic declines by 50 percent, as it did in 2010-13, and then keeps going down.

Most interesting to me was the third factor Thompson cited: “Americans are shifting their spending from materialism to meals out with friends.” Data from the Federal Reserve Bank at St. Louis certainly supports the idea that spending at restaurants has grown faster than general retail spending, especially since the Great Recession, and travel and lodging are booming while less is being spent on clothing.

Thompson plays up the idea that young consumers are “driven by the experiences that will make the best social media content” — beach pictures and food porn posted on Instagram. Since it wasn’t supported by the kind of statistics he used elsewhere in the article, I found this to be his weakest explanation.

He left completely unexplored the fact that more young adults are living with their parents longer, delaying marriage and all the shopping associated with setting up housekeeping. Nor did he discuss the impact that other rapidly increasing expenses — health care and student loans — have had on disposable income.

While Thompson’s topic was retail, I can’t help wondering whether the fact that most of us already have too much stuff is cutting into the appetite for more stuff. My son is living in a rent house with some buddies, and I’m not sure they have a stick of furniture, dish or pan that was purchased new.

And it’s not just for kids. My husband and I prowl the estate sales almost every Saturday morning, and it’s now hard to imagine paying retail prices for flower pots or tools or costume jewelry. For household items, Craigslist, which supplanted newspaper classifieds, now has competition from local resale pages on Facebook — and the market is so glutted that prices are rock-bottom.

Statistics on the resale sector are hard to come by, but it wouldn’t surprise me if one of the biggest competitors for retailers is the stuff they’ve already sold.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.

Acxiom Corp. has narrowed its focus and is evolving into a different company, CEO Scott Howe says.

“We’re becoming a different kind of Acxiom, with the best of the old but a lot of really new, exciting stuff,” he said in a recent interview. “Over time, I’d like to think we stop becoming the marketing company and increasingly become the data company that is effective in marketing, in health care, in insurance and B2B supply chain.”

The evolution includes the sale last month of Acxiom’s Little Rock headquarters, which was never fully occupied, and plans to renovate its original campus in Conway.

The company also hopes to expand its client base. “Any industry that needs to collect, ingest, interpret and activate data is an industry that, long term, we intend to serve,” Howe said.

And since data involves everything these days, that intention has the potential to fuel growth.

Howe compared the firm as it is now to Amazon in 1996. Amazon had built a great infrastructure to sell books. Now it’s an online retail giant selling just about anything.

He said Acxiom built its data infrastructure for one purpose: to sell marketing services. But the same infrastructure that solves complex marketing problems could be used to solve complex problems in other industries where a lot of data is available, but in separate silos.

Howe gave the example of enabling medical records housed at different doctors’ offices to follow the patient from doctor to doctor instead.

He hopes to please shareholders with revenue growth of more than 10 percent this year, compared with the 1.5 to 2 percent annual growth Acxiom has seen over the past five years.

His plans include continuing to gain both direct clients — very large companies that Acxiom assigns teams to work with — and indirect clients. Those clients, which Acxiom didn’t have five years ago, are businesses that use sites like Facebook to purchase targeted advertising that runs on Acxiom’s data infrastructure.

Howe said gains in indirect clients have fueled a boom, with Acxiom adding more clients in the last two years than in the previous 10 years combined.

As it’s shifting to doing more, the company has also narrowed its focus to three segments: marketing services, audience solutions and connectivity.

The firm moved away from a “mismatched portfolio” by selling off subsidiaries that didn’t quite fit, like its email business and information technology services business, Howe said.

He then described the company’s more cohesive portfolio these days.

The connectivity segment is like a phone grid or electric grid, but for data, he said. It has been enhanced by the company’s acquisition of digital marketing service LiveRamp. Howe thinks of connectivity as “the pipes that connect the world.”

Audience solutions are the fuel that runs through those pipes, Howe said. That division deals in preparing raw data for client use.

The segment launched a self-service tool called Audience Cloud this year for advanced management of data across all the ways it is delivered to consumers — traditional mail, email, mobile, social media and more. Howe said the new tool automates the selling of data.

Marketing services is an extension of the client’s marketing staff. That division figures out what the data means and how to use it in advertising and marketing campaigns, Howe said.

“We are unquestionably the best marketing services, marketing database company in the world. And we have been that for 40 years. That’s our legacy. But, by virtue of having our data business and our connectivity business, it makes that marketing services business even stronger,” he said.

“Likewise, the symbiosis between if you lay down pipes and then you have the data to push through it, those two businesses are perfectly complementary,” Howe said.

(Related: What Does Acxiom Do?)

Praises LR HQ Sale
The CEO also said selling the headquarters in downtown Little Rock — 12 stories, 188,460 SF and the adjoining parking deck — to Simmons Bank of Pine Bluff is a good move in the right direction. The $25 million from the sale freed up capital to renovate the Conway campus, built more than 40 years ago.

Six floors spread among three buildings have already been modernized, according to Marc Haynes, vice president of Acxiom’s 160-person Workplace Experience division, which is in charge of amenities for employees that include a community garden, soccer field, one free lunch per week, discounted massages, a recently remodeled fitness center and much more.

The company plans to finish sprucing up the rest of the campus in its next fiscal year, which runs from April 1 to March 31, Haynes said.

The company declined to disclose how much it is investing in the Conway headquarters.

“The key word for us is drive innovation and engagement,” Haynes said, adding that the company is giving employees a more open layout with sit-and-stand desks.

Howe said innovation happens when employees bump into each other, so plans call for a larger cafeteria and community space on the Conway campus. The goal is making Acxiom a better place to work.

He said that the Little Rock building never held the 660 people it was built for, and he believes the investment in the Conway campus should have been made long ago.

Charles Morgan, Acxiom’s CEO for 36 years before retiring in 2008, said the building was about 80 percent occupied at its peak 10 years ago.

Plans for its construction were announced in 1999, and the city helped out with a multimillion-dollar revenue bond issue.

At that time, Morgan said, Acxiom had tapped out the market in Conway and Little Rock was more central for commuters from Hot Springs and other cities. A survey of employees also revealed a desire to be downtown. Then the city offered incentives.

Morgan said the building’s recent lackluster occupancy was caused by executives moving to California, where Howe lives, and by the placement of more employees in larger cities in other states.

Vice President Haynes said 1,500 employees — more than half of Acxiom’s U.S. workforce of over 2,800 — now work in Conway. It employs another 800 to 1,000 overseas.

More than 100 employees moved to Conway after the sale of the building, but its 14-person legal team will stay in Little Rock.

They will work in the Third Street building, with Simmons Bank’s permission, until a temporary space is found. But by fall they will move into 11,215 SF of leased space being renovated on the second and third floors of a multi-tenant building at 301 Main St.

The Main Street location will have room for 50 people and will serve employees who need an occasional desk there or to meet with clients in Little Rock.

Where the Clients Are
In explaining the movement of Arkansas employees, Howe also responded to criticism concerning Acxiom’s senior executives living outside Arkansas.

“I think that is the silliest thing. In any global company, it doesn’t matter where people live. What matters is where are their clients. That’s where you’ll want to be,” he said.

“If headquarters are defined by where the senior executives sleep, then our headquarters is probably an aisle exit row on American Airlines,” Howe joked.

“Our leadership, they’re on planes. They’re going to see clients. They’re going to collaborate. And having them sit in an office in a headquarters would be the biggest waste of time,” he said. “That’s not how modern companies are run.”

Howe lives on the West Coast, but has a condo in downtown Little Rock.

He said the highest-ranking executives who spend most of their time in Arkansas include Mike Lloyd, senior vice president of sales and client services, Chief Legal Officer Jerry Jones and Chief Security Officer Frank Caserta.

But no matter who it hires or where those employees call home, Howe said, Acxiom will always seek out Arkansas values, like a strong work ethic.

Howe said people around the world are rediscovering the company, but it’s still a hidden gem in its home state, and he’s working to make it noticed.

When he took over, “for whatever reason, we had fallen out of our step. It started to become a little forgotten. … All the answers were here.

“Between our people and our clients, they told us exactly what we should do and we followed that, and I think, with a lot of success,” Howe said.

One result of the changes at Acxiom has been its growth in market capital, from less than $900 million when Howe arrived in 2011 to $2.2 billion this year — or about $10 a share to $27-28 a share, he said.

Also, its client base is “creeping up on 100,000,” including those new indirect clients.

Some downtown Little Rock property owners are surprised and upset that three public housing towers have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places despite being rejected by the state’s review board.

The Fred W. Parris Towers, the Cumberland Towers and the Jesse Powell Towers were built in the early 1970s to provide affordable housing for senior citizens. The Metropolitan Housing Authority of Little Rock, which owns all three buildings, requested the towers be placed on the national register; their inclusions would allow the MHA to receive up to $11 million in state and federal tax credits for renovations of historic buildings.

Heritage Consulting Group of Portland, Oregon, which specializes in obtaining historic status for developments, made a presentation on the Housing Authority’s behalf at the State Review Board of the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program meeting on Dec. 7 in Little Rock. The board voted 4-2 to exclude the towers from the national register.

Stacy Hurst, the director of the Department of Arkansas Heritage, then directly nominated the towers to the National Park Service on Jan. 17. The Department of Arkansas Heritage announced the towers had made the national register list on March 25.

The announcement stunned the proposal’s opponents, who had not known Hurst had directly applied for the towers’ register inclusion at the federal level.

“I personally think heads need to roll over this,” said Sharon Welch-Blair, who spoke against the proposal at the review board meeting. She is a past president of Little Rock’s Downtown Neighborhood Association. “We need to stand up. The problem we have right now is citizens aren’t standing up on principle. This is a money-grubbing issue that doesn’t have anything to do with historic properties. This has to do with who can make money.”

When Hurst’s office was contacted for a comment on her support for register status for the towers, Communications Director Melissa Whitfield responded by emailing a copy of the nomination letter Hurst sent to the National Park Service.

$55 Million Renovation
The towers were erected in response to a federal policy that gave funding priority to senior public housing projects. Little Rock responded by building Parris in 1972, Cumberland in 1974 and Powell in 1975, by which time the federal policy had changed.

Proponents of the towers’ national register inclusion argued that the buildings are historically significant as local examples of the federal public housing initiative. That significance compensated for the buildings being less than 50 years old, which is an unofficial cutoff age for register applicants.

The three towers represent nearly 600 residential units, and the Housing Authority plans a $55 million renovation project for the buildings. Because the buildings are for low-income seniors and disabled people, it’s unlikely rent payments will make up the costs.

That’s why the tax credits become such an important factor in the buildings’ renovations, for which the Housing Authority plans to partner with Gorman & Co. Inc. of Oregon, Wisconsin. It is expected that as much as $11 million of the $55 million cost could be reimbursed through various state and federal tax credits.

Jill Judy, who owns Little Rock Historical Properties with her husband, said she was approached about buying Parris Towers, but that idea disappeared when the Housing Authority decided to put the complex on the national register. Judy said she and her husband live near Parris Towers and own property near Cumberland Towers.

“That went away all of a sudden when they decided to put it on the historical register,” Judy said. “Then it became a good enough building to rehab.”

Judy expressed concern that the towers’ renovation tax credits will result in less money being available for other preservation projects. State law was recently adjusted to allow for $400,000 in state credit per project with an annual cap of $4 million; the three towers would conceivably receive $1.2 million in annual credits.

“You don’t make money running these things,” Judy said. “You make money totally on the front end when you do the construction and get your tax credits back.”

‘Absolutely Entitled’
Patricia Blick said Judy’s concerns about tax credit allotment are a bit overblown because the state’s $4 million cap has been reached only once since 2009. Blick was the deputy director of the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program when the towers were first put up for register listing.

The staff of the AHPP, a division of the Department of Arkansas Heritage, analyzed the nomination and ultimately decided to reject the towers as a suitable register listing. Hurst, an appointee of Gov. Asa Hutchinson, decided to submit the towers to the state review board for a vote, where they were again rejected.

Blick left the AHPP in mid-January to become executive director of the Quapaw Quarter Association. Director Molly McSwain also retired in January, but Blick said her departure had nothing to do with any disagreements with Hurst.

(Related: Quapaw Quarter's Patricia Blick Says Historic Preservation Can Bring Forth Economic Benefits)

She said there was nothing untoward about Hurst’s and the Housing Authority’s persistence in pushing the nomination up the food chain after each rejection.

“They are absolutely entitled to take it to the actual state review board,” Blick said. “Basically, Stacy, as the state’s historic preservation officer, is authorized to still put forth a nomination to the keeper of the national register. I would say, too, to be fair, you or I could nominate a property and we could do the same.

“The people who wanted to pursue this pursued all their avenues. They were entitled to that and they did it.”

Blick said that while the Park Service generally defers to the state’s judgment in historic decisions, it is not a rubberstamp. Judy and Welch-Blair, however, are upset because the national review happened so quickly without any publicity about the towers being up for a decision.

Blick had the same confusion when she heard the towers had been approved in March. She reached out to Jim Gabbart, who reviews Arkansas submissions for the Park Service.

Gabbart, who was unavailable for comment, told Blick in an email that Hurst’s nomination of the towers happened days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The incoming administration then ordered a freeze on register notices on Jan. 20, after the proposal’s 45-day calendar had started but before it had been publicized on a list of pending items.

After 45 days, nominations are automatically listed unless the Keeper of the National Register vetoes the nomination. Gabbart said the towers proposal was reviewed by a public housing expert, who found the nomination satisfactory.

Blick said there probably wouldn’t have been much disagreement about the towers’ inclusion if they had been more than 50 years old. She said that even though the buildings aren’t pretty — Judy called them “ugly eyesores” and Welch-Blair referred to a “concrete monstrosity” — there is more to history than beauty.

“It was unexpected how everything unfolded,” Blick said. “We were kind of surprised too, to be perfectly honest. I don’t think it was underhanded.”

Stanley Conrad with Hooters of Arkansas has filed a new application with the state for a restaurant mixed drink permit for a location at 6 Bass Pro Drive in Little Rock.

This would be a second central Arkansas location for the owl-themed restaurant chain, which has a store at 4110 Landers Road in North Little Rock. (And no, despite the owl logo, it’s not really owl-themed.)

A Hooters representative hadn’t returned our email as of press time.

Tacos 4 Life, the restaurant mini-chain based in Conway, appears poised to move beyond “mini-chain” status to plain “chain” status with its plans to open more locations in Arkansas, the hiring of a chief marketing officer and, in particular, its announcement last week that franchise opportunities are now available in Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama and Tennessee.

Austin Samuelson, who founded Tacos 4 Life, with his wife, Ashton, told Whispers they had been working on the franchise plan for the last six months.

“We’ve just really just gotten to the point in the last few weeks where we’ve been able to say, ‘OK, we’re ready to go live with this,’” Samuelson said.

He noted the addition to the Tacos 4 Life team in December of Donnie Robertson, chief marketing officer, touting his marketing experience at franchisers Nothing Bundt Cakes and Cicis Pizza.

With the company’s focus on fighting childhood hunger — it donates 22 cents to the nonprofit Feed My Starving Children for every meal sold — “franchising is a great answer” to the question of “What would feed the most kids?” Samuelson said.

In addition, Tacos 4 Life is on its way to opening 15 company-owned stores within the next three to four years, the company says. Tacos 4 Life, which has two restaurants in Conway, one each in Fayetteville and Conway and a Benton location scheduled to open today, is set to open a franchise location in Searcy this summer and a company-owned store in Springdale in the fall, among others on the way, the restaurateur said.

The company has attracted investors, Samuelson said, though he declined to identify them, but is also funding its growth through the revenue from its current restaurants.

The company’s website says that total initial investment necessary to begin operation of Tacos 4 Life franchise ranges from $511,466 to $737,400 and that franchise candidates and their partners/investors must have a combined liquid capital of at least $150,000 and a combined net worth of at least $600,000.

Samuelson said the company has already received a lot of interest from potential franchisees, who are attracted to Tacos 4 Life because of the uniqueness and quality of its food, the family atmosphere and the company’s mission. He said each store can feed, through the donations to Feed My Starving Children, about 1,000 kids a day.

“And who doesn’t love tacos? It’s a win-win.”

A retail building, a fast-food eatery and an undeveloped parcel generated multimillion-dollar transactions.

• Gateway Village I LLC, led by Tommy Hodges, sold the 10,430-SF 6 Bass Pro Drive project for more than $3.5 million.

Who bought the home of David’s Burgers, Hogman’s Gameday Superstore and more?

Three limited liability companies managed by the Little Rock office of Colliers International: 300 West Lime (Lakeland), 64.9 percent; Huntsville Investors, 25 percent; and Gateway Village Lot 2, 10.1 percent.

• D.L. Rogers Corp. of North Richland Hills, Texas, bought the Sonic Drive-In at 11700 Col. Glenn Road for $1.3 million.

Seller: LLEJ Lot 1 LLC, led by Leonard Boen.

• Presbytery of Arkansas sold 10 acres near the southwest corner of Chenal Parkway and Bayfield Drive for $1 million.

Buyer: Crest At Chenal LLC, led by Larry Crain Jr.

Leaders should tell the truth, be transparent and communicate regularly with stakeholders during a crisis, says Fitz Hill, a former college football coach and college president, in Part 2 of Arkansas Business' new video series on leadership.

Hill, the executive director of the Scott Ford Center for Entrepreneurship & Community Development and the Arkansas Baptist College Foundation, sat down with Online Editor Lance Turner for the first installment of Arkansas Business' "Foundations" video series.

The series aims to highlight key tools for success for businesses, nonprofits and other organizations. The first four videos of the series, which will premiere over the next two months, focus on leadership and feature interviews with Hill, Gina Radke of Galley Support Innovations Inc. of Sherwood and Jon Harrison of VIP2.

In Part 2 of a two-part conversation, Hill talks about his time as president of Arkansas Baptist College, the challenges he faced there, and his new role leading the Scott Ford Center. The center, which launched in 2012, is aimed at developing a trained corps of entrepreneurs prepared to start businesses in underserved communities. 

You can watch Part 2 right here:

(Part 1 of the interview is available here.)

During his time as college president, Hill dealt with cash flow problems as the school quickly took on more students. Calling it a humbling experience, Hill said he learned that leaders must always be upfront with stakeholders and confront problems directly, even when the answers don't come easy.

"When that phone rings, answer it, and tell them what your situation is," Hill said. "Don't not answer the phone … don't delay calling them back — make the call first [that] you don't want to make."

An Arkadelphia native, Hill graduated from Ouachita Baptist University in 1987. He received a master's from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, in 1991 and a doctorate in higher education leadership from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1997. 

Hill rose to become Razorback assistant head football coach before becoming head football coach at San Jose State University in 2001-05. He was executive director of the Ouachita Baptist Opportunity Fund from 2005-06. In 2006, he became the 13th president of the historically black, 132-year-old Arkansas Baptist College. He left the president's post in 2016 to lead the college's foundation.

The effects of changing consumer shopping habits are starting to show up in northwest Arkansas commercial real estate trends, according to the latest Arvest Bank Skyline Report on real estate.

The report, released Wednesday, details occupancy rates for commercial and multifamily real estate in Benton and Washington counties during the last six months of 2016.

The report shows more than 1 million SF of commercial space  — a combination of new and existing space — were absorbed during the second half of last year. The vacancy rate for all commercial space fell from 12.7 percent in the first half of 2016 to 11.7 percent in the second half.

In all, commercial space in the two counties saw a net positive absorption of 463,941 SF, up from 11,847 SF in the first half of 2016, the report said.

More: Download the report's commercial highlights.

The report also noted changes in the retail and warehouse markets. The report said retail saw an increase in vacancy rates to 9.4 percent, up from from 9.2 percent in the first half of 2016. Warehouse properties, meanwhile, saw a significant decrease in vacancy rates year-over-year, falling to 8.1 percent in the second half of 2016 from 11.5 percent in the second half of 2015. 

Kathy Deck, the lead researcher for the Skyline Report and director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, said the trend is likely a result of shoppers' changing shopping preferences.

"As consumers have increasingly embraced online shopping, it stands to reason that these new shopping preferences will have an impact on different types of commercial real estate with the retail real estate market softening while the warehouse market begins to tighten," she said. "I think that is what we are likely witnessing here in northwest Arkansas."

The report showed strength in among office properties, which added 155,933 SF in the second half of 2016 and showed a net positive absorption of 115,463 SF.

From July 1 to Dec. 31, there were $137.2 million in commercial building permits issued in northwest Arkansas, down from the $206.5 million in the first half of the year and $112.8 million in the last half of 2015.

"Overall, the commercial real estate market can be described as both very active and well-balanced at this time," Deck said.

Multifamily Vacancy Remains Low

The report said vacancy rates in multifamily real estate rose slightly from the first half of the year but remain at low levels. The overall vacancy rate was 3.2 percent, up from 2.4 percent in the first half of the year. The report tracks 336,159 multifamily units in 735 multifamily properties in the two counties.

"We are visiting with a large number of clients who have been very encouraged regarding the real estate development market here in northwest Arkansas," Craig Rivaldo, president of Arvest Bank of Benton County, said about the report. "They have been seeing and hearing what this report indicates – that the market is well balanced, and there are plenty of good opportunities for intelligent commercial and multifamily projects now and in the future."

More: Download the report's multifamily highlights.

Springdale has the lowest vacancy rate in the region, 0.9 percent, followed by Bentonville at 1.3 percent, Siloam Springs at 1.8 percent, Rogers at 2.7 percent and Fayetteville at 4.7 percent. 

Fayetteville's vacancy rate was up from 3.6 percent in the first half of 2016. Deck attributed the rise to a "substantial" number of "by-the-bed" rental units targeted to college students coming onto the market after the start of the fall school semester.

Increased demand put upward pressure on lease rates; the average monthly lease price for a multifamily property unit in northwest Arkansas rose to $627.04 from $608.88 in the first half of 2016.

"We are running out of adjectives to describe the multifamily market in northwest Arkansas," Deck said. "Considering that what is generally considered the normal vacancy rate in multifamily properties is 5 percent, for the overall rate in northwest Arkansas to be in the 3 percent range and to have stayed under 4 percent since the second half of 2014 is remarkable. 

"With so many new multifamily properties under construction or recently announced, we anticipate that we will likely be in the more normal range of 5 percent within 18 to 24 months," she said. "And with so many of the newer properties having a more robust set of amenities, it won't be surprising if we see higher average rates at that time, even with a higher overall vacancy rate."

The Arvest Skyline Report is a biannual analysis of the commercial, single-family residential and multi-family residential property markets in the two counties counties. The report is sponsored by Arvest Bank and conducted by the Center for Business and Economic Research in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the UA.

WASHINGTON — Americans purchased homes in March at the fastest pace in over a decade, a strong start to the traditional spring buying season.

Sales of existing homes climbed 4.4 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.71 million, the National Association of Realtors said Friday. This was the fastest sales rate since February 2007.

The U.S. housing market faces something of a split personality: A stable economy has intensified demand from would-be buyers, but the number of properties listed for sale has been steadily fading. The result of this trend is prices rising faster than incomes, homes staying on the market for fewer days and a limit on just how much home sales can grow. It's a situation that rewards would-be buyers who can act quickly and decisively.

"The pace of sales we saw in March is unsustainable," said Nela Richardson, chief economist at the brokerage Redfin. "Sales may be soaring, but inventory isn't."

The inventory shortage largely reflects the legacy of a housing bubble that began to burst a decade ago.

Foreclosed properties were snapped up by investors who turned the homes into income-generating rentals, depriving the market of supply. And many owners who escaped the downturn unharmed chose to refinance their mortgages at extremely low rates, possibly making them hesitant to move to a new house that could increase their monthly costs.

This mismatch between supply and demand can be seen in two simple figures tracked by the Realtors.

Sales have risen 5.9 percent over the past year, but the inventory of homes for sale has fallen 6.6 percent to 1.83 million properties. This means there are essentially more buyers chasing fewer properties.

The consequences can be seen in home values and days on the market. The median sales price in March climbed 6.8 percent over the past year to $236,400, significantly outpacing wage growth. And it took an average of 34 days to complete a sale, compared to 47 days a year ago.

In March, sales rose in the Northeast, Midwest and South but declined in the West.

It's possible that more Americans are devoting their incomes to housing as retail sales have struggled in recent months, said Jennifer Lee, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets.

"Although spending on doo-dads may have slowed, perhaps more of their funds are being directed towards housing," Lee said.

Demand might increase further as mortgage rates began to dip in recent weeks.

Home loan costs had been climbing after President Donald Trump won the November election, under the belief that the government would engage in forms of stimulus such as tax cuts and greater deficits that could cause higher levels of inflation. But major initiatives such as tax reform have stalled in recent weeks as the administration has yet to put forward a proposal, prompting more doubts as to when and whether any stimulus might arrive.

Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday that the average interest rate on 30-year fixed-rate home loans declined to 3.97 percent this week from 4.08 percent last week. The average is now at its lowest level in five months.

(Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

Research in behavioral science is showing that there is a trend toward higher irritability in the workplace — especially in the United States — and it has been more pronounced over the last 24 months. In short, more of us spend more time in a bad mood at work than ever before.

There are even healthy, if snarky, internet memes on the subject. In one, the comic strip character Calvin howls, “I’m in a very bad mood, so nobody’d better mess with me today, boy!!” Bad moods are generally the result of higher stress, lower satisfaction, elevated levels of fear (even if we do not have something specific to be afraid of) and an increase in feelings of powerlessness. Bad moods are also contagious, according to Scientific American. And in a business, bad moods are expensive. Consider these examples pulled from a recent organizational psychology study.

• The senior vice president of a bank’s branch operations is unhappy with a decision his boss made and takes his irritability into a meeting with a branch manager. She leaves the meeting feeling tentative and concerned for her job. When she declines to make a reasonable accommodation for a longtime customer, the customer’s family business moves to a competing bank.

• A surgeon with a reputation for being unapproachable arrives for surgery in a particularly bad mood. Surgical staff say nothing when the surgeon opens the wrong leg on a patient.

• A plant manager, angry about budget cuts, shortens his morning safety meeting. While the engineering staff is drawing straws about who will tell him about a maintenance issue that needs attention on one of the lines, a belt breaks and there are three serious injuries and one death.

What may be most discouraging about this normal human condition is that if we begin our day in a bad mood, we are likely to remain moody and unapproachable for the entire day. It takes a concerted effort to shake off a bad mood — and generally one of the conditions of our mood is that we feel no reason to need to change it.

But change it we can and change it we should. Going through the day in a bad mood is not positive for our performance or our career. And it can create rifts that take weeks, months, even years to get over. If you are the leader of an organization, failing to shake off a bad mood gives tacit permission for the entire organization to do the same. So, here are a few ways to shake off a bad mood:

Get outside! Even a five-minute walk outside, focusing more on the sky, birds, dogs and kids in a park, whatever nature offers can provide a reframe allowing the ability to let go of a foul temperament.

Oxygen is your friend. A few deep breaths are useful for clearing the body of stress-inducing hormones.

What am I really irritated about? A little time in consideration of the source of your irritation, anger, or discontent can be useful as well. It may be that the thing most driving your bad mood can be addressed constructively, but only if you identify it.

Does this all sound simplistic? A little on the “armchair shrink” side? Perhaps. But in the end, we are human beings. And as leaders in an organization we have an obligation to both model the behavior we want in others, and be the standard-bearer for the culture we aspire to create. If taking five minutes out to reset your own mood then prevents you from modeling poor behavior that often can lead to poor business outcomes, that might be the most important five minutes of your day.

I. Barry Goldberg is an executive coach with a global practice and runs CEO and key executive peer advisory groups in central Arkansas. Email him at Barry.Goldberg@EntelechyPartners.com.

A Rogers investor bought a 33,882-SF shopping center in Fayetteville for nearly $3.7 million.

Zheng Lin LLC, led by Jian Fei Lin, bought Joyce Plaza at the northwest corner of Joyce Avenue and Steele Boulevard. The complex covers 3.77 acres and was formerly anchored by Buffalo Wild Wings, which recently moved across Joyce to a location adjacent to the Malco Cinema.

The seller was Joyce Plaza LLC of Little Rock, led by Pete Hornibrook. Arvest Bank of Fayetteville assisted the purchase with a loan of a little more than $2.95 million.

Springdale Warehouses
A property management firm paid nearly $2.5 million for a warehouse complex in Springdale.

Oldwire LLC of Fayetteville, led by Whitley Dunn, bought the complex at 444 Old Wire Road. Dunn is the president of Dunn Property Management, which lists the property as having 18 warehouses totaling more than 97,000 SF.

First State Bank of Fayetteville assisted the purchase with a loan of $2.125 million.

The seller was a combination of Today’s Bank, Union Bank & Trust Co. and First NaturalState Bank.

Harps Food Store
A former Harps Food Store in Elkins sold for $425,000.

Midland Properties South LLC of Rogers bought the 1.95-acre lot with a 15,328-SF building at 110 N. Center St. Midland Properties South is a subsidiary of Midland Industrial Service, a mechanical, electrical and industrial contractor that was founded in Rogers in 2010.

Harps Food Stores Inc. of Springdale was the seller.

Midland Properties South is led by Midland Industrial co-owners Joe Austin, David Stone and Kenny Williams Jr. The buyers signed a restrictive covenant with Harps in which they promised to not open or lease to a grocery store for 99 years or a pharmacy for 10 years.

Harps has a store in Elkins at 1951 N. Center, about 2 miles north of its former location.

Flying Dog Sale
Mark Zweig Inc., a property development company in Fayetteville, bought the Flying Dog Vintage Mall in Fayetteville.

Zweig paid $205,000 for the 6,355-SF retail center at 427 N. College Ave. Mark Zweig Inc. is led by founder Mark Zweig, who plans to renovate the property to serve as the new headquarters for Mark Zweig Inc.

Zweig is also chairman of the Zweig Group, an architectural and engineering consulting firm in Fayetteville. Zweig said he also plans to use the location to store his collection of automobiles and motorcycles.

The seller was the Farmers & Merchant Bank, which acquired the property when it bought the Bank of Fayetteville in 2015. The Bank of Fayetteville acquired the property in lieu of foreclosure from Packardonblock LLC, led by Atal Harshad Patel.

Hospital Land
Washington Regional Medical Center paid $1.65 million for nearly 9 acres in Fayetteville.

The land is at the southwest corner of Drake Street and North Gregg Avenue, a few blocks from the hospital. Drake Street Holdings LLC of Alma, led by Jack Alexander, was the seller.

School Purchase
Prism Education Center paid $825,000 for a 2-acre lot on East Joyce Boulevard in Fayetteville.

The property has two office buildings with a combined 9,375 SF. Prism is a private school with three campuses in Fayetteville that serves students from preschool through high school.

First Security Bank of Fayetteville assisted the purchase with a loan of $720,000. Covan LLC of Springdale, led by Gene Anderson, was the seller.

5 Dogs Buy
The founder of the northwest Arkansas restaurant chain Foghorn’s bought a 5,950-SF mixed-use building for $415,000.

5 Dogs Investments LLC of Springdale, led by Jeff Hodges, bought the property at 451 E. Township St. in Fayetteville. The seller was the James Doyle & Wilma Doris Shelton Revocable Family Trust of Fayetteville.

First National Bank of Fayetteville assisted the purchase with a loan of nearly $353,000.

A 188,460-SF office building in downtown Little Rock weighed in at $25 million.

Acxiom Corp. sold its 12-story headquarters and supporting five-story parking deck at 601 E. Third St. to Simmons Bank of Pine Bluff.

The transaction involved the city transferring ownership of the 4.5-acre development to Acxiom.

The property was held nominally by the city to facilitate a $17 million bond issue in July 2003 to finance construction of the project.

The site was purchased for $1.44 million in January 2000 from Stephens Group Inc.

Terraforma Transaction
Undeveloped land near the Arkansas River in downtown North Little Rock sold for $2.53 million as part of a tax-deferred exchange transaction.

Smarthouse Way LLC, an intermediary for Terraforma LLC, acquired the 5.8-acre tract south of Riverfront Drive between the Broadway Bridge and Smarthouse Drive from the Public Building Authority of the city of North Little Rock.

The deal, which sets the stage for a mixed-use development, is backed with a two-year loan of $2.2 million from First Security Bank of Searcy.

The property previously was tied to a May 2008 mortgage of $785,000 held by the Pulaski County Brownfields Revolving Loan Fund.

Two Sherwood properties and a sliver of land in North Little Rock completed the exchange transaction.

Terraforma and 5620 Warden Road LLC, both led by Doug Meyer and David Bruning, sold the 2.9-acre 4Wheel Parts development at 5620 Warden Road and the 2.34-acre Carhop development at 5600 Warden Road for $2.4 million.

The buyer is Bayird Properties LLC, led by Keith and Amy Bayird. The deal is funded with a five-year loan of $2.4 million from Focus Bank of Charleston, Missouri.

Terraforma purchased the Sherwood land in January 1996 as part of a $324,000 deal with the J.A. Faulkner estate.

The 0.27-acre strip in North Lit-tle Rock was acquired for $20,000 in June 2001 from the Woodcrest Co. LLP, led by James P. Matthews.

The riverfront property was assembled by the Urban Renewal Agency of the city of North Little Rock as part of transactions during the early 1970s totaling more than $663,000.

The sellers were Irma Culbert Lincoln et al, E.M. Pfeifer, Missouri Pacific Railroad Co., Herman Loket, A.P.T. Construction Co., Jeffrey Sand Co., General Wood Products Co., Fell Vaughan and Gray Supply Co.

Innwood Acquisition
An 18,400-SF office building in west Little Rock tipped the scales at $1.55 million.

Innwood Building LLC, led by Dennis Baas, sold its namesake project at 3 Innwood Circle.

The buyer is Three Innwood LLC, led by Dennis Ford.

Innwood Building carried the entire purchase price in the form of a 10-year loan.

The 1.29-acre development was acquired for $693,000 in May 1995 from Resource Capital Development Corp., led by C.D. Williams.

Car Wash Purchase
A Jacksonville car wash changed hands in a $270,000 transaction.

Titan Car Wash LLC, led by Bryan Clayton, bought the 701 N. J.P. Wright Loop Road property. The seller is A&H Car Wash Inc., led by Joe Douglas.

The deal is financed with a three-year loan of $190,000 from First Arkansas Bank & Trust of Jacksonville and a $60,000 loan from Ronald and Suzanne Clayton of Mesquite, Nevada.

The 0.44-acre development previously was linked with an October 2016 mortgage of $150,000 held by First Arkansas Bank & Trust.

A&H purchased the property for $42,000 in July 1994 from Harco Inc., led by John Hardin.

Downtown Deal
A 6,948-SF building in downtown Little Rock is under new ownership after a $235,000 deal.

Ally Jade Investments Inc., led by Sam Carrasquillo, acquired the Bensky Furs project at 811 Main St.

The seller is Fletcher Realty LLC, led by Frank Fletcher.

The deal is backed with a five-year loan of $551,376 from Arvest Bank of Fayetteville

Fletcher Realty bought the 0.16-acre development for $265,000 in December 1999.

The seller was Riley Co., led by Pat Riley.

Package Store Buy
A 1,500-SF liquor store in east Little Rock rang up a $200,000 sale.

2017 AAP DA Bopp LLC, led by Baljinder Singh, purchased the Bopp Liquor project at 1021 E. Ninth St. from Bill Robinson.

The 0.74-acre development was acquired for $110,000 in August 1983 from Roy and Evelyn Foster.

Palisade Manor
A 4,996-SF home in the Palisade Estates neighborhood of Cammack Village weighed in at $1.92 million.

Palisades Park LLC, led by Lambert Marshall Jr., bought the house from Craig and Elizabeth Campbell.

The residence was purchased for $425,000 in February 1986 from Reita Miller.

Chimney Rock House
A 7,316-SF home in North Little Rock’s Chimney Rock neighborhood drew an $845,000 transaction.

CRM Revocable Trust, led by Amelia Muse, acquired the house from William and Sheila Hogan.

The Hogans bought the location for $118,000 in December 1999.

The seller was Matthews Properties, led by Hal Matthews.

High-Rise Home
A 1,842-SF condominium in downtown Little Rock’s River Market Tower sold for $565,000.

The Aaron Peeples Family 2011 Gift Trust purchased the 15th-floor unit at 315 Rock St. from Steven and Alicia Rucker.

The residence previously was tied to a September 2015 mortgage of $375,000 held by Regions Bank of Birmingham, Alabama.

The Ruckers acquired the property for $555,000 more than 18 months ago from RMT II LLC, led by Jimmy Moses and Rett Tucker.

Today’s Bank of Huntsville is adding a 10th branch to its network with a Van Buren location.

The $181 million-asset lender is setting up shop in a former bank branch at 615 E. Pointer Trail previously used by Arkansas Valley Electric Cooperative.

“We think the Van Buren market is a good market,” said Larry Olson, president and CEO of Today’s Bank. “That is one of the things that attracted us to look at Allied Bank.”

Today’s Bank looked at entering the Van Buren market in 2014 as part of a three-branch purchase of Allied locations in Van Buren, Mansfield and Alma. That proposed deal failed to gain the needed approval of creditors of Allied’s parent company (Acme Holding Co.) and regulators.

Instead, Today’s entered the Crawford County market in September as part of a negative bid of $6.1 million for the insolvent Allied Bank. Allied’s Van Buren branch, which closed in 2015, wasn’t part of that deal.

When Today’s entered the ownership picture, Allied’s operations in Crawford County consisted of offices in Mulberry and Alma, home to $31.1 million in deposits in June 2016. That represented 4.39 percent of deposits in the county.

Courtni Champion has been promoted to leasing and relocation director at Apartment Hunters/Tuggle Services Inc. of Little Rock, where she was previously a leasing and relocation specialist.

Champion is a licensed real estate agent who has more than six years of experience in the multifamily real estate industry.

Crystal Arcicovich has been named catering sales manager at the Four Points by Sheraton Little Rock Midtown.

She was previously director of group sales for the United Shore Professional Baseball League in Utica, Michigan.

Jessica Thompson has joined Midwest Litigation Services as an account manager at the Little Rock office.

She previously served in the U.S. Marine Corps for eight years as well as in various legal and marketing positions.

See more of this week's Movers & Shakers, and submit your own announcement at ArkansasBusiness.com/Movers.

Arkansas State University’s new hospitality management program has plenty of vacancies, partly because few students know about it: Officials are waiting for a $50 million billboard to point to.

A-State announced its academic emphasis on hospitality studies at the same time plans were revealed for a 203-room hotel, convention center and Houlihan’s restaurant on the Jonesboro campus. Beyond being a commercial enterprise, the complex is envisioned as a kind of hands-on laboratory for the growing field of hospitality management, and an advertisement for the A-State program.

For now, though, the 11-acre site for the Embassy Suites by Hilton and Red Wolf Convention Center near the university’s football stadium remains an empty field, except for a few rolls of chain-link fencing, even though preliminary plans were announced as early as 2013.

“We haven’t promoted the program a whole lot in advance of the convention center being built,” said Professor Melodie Philhours, chair of A-State’s department of management and marketing. “That will be a key for us, and as the convention center moves forward we will start to promote the program more and get the students into the pipeline with training and internships.” For now, the program has fewer than a dozen students.

Construction has been snagged by design details, according to project developer Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Hospitality Management of Springfield, Missouri. “The design of these big projects just sometimes takes longer than we would hope,” O’Reilly said in an email to Arkansas Business.

Site work was expected to start in the third quarter of last year, and O’Reilly said in February the start would come in mid-April. As that deadline passed, O’Reilly said he was waiting for the city of Jonesboro’s final approval of architectural plans, which call for 40,000 SF of convention and meeting space. Killian Construction Co. of Springfield is lining up subcontractors with a groundbreaking expected soon, O’Reilly said.

Construction could take up to 18 months, but A-State officials say the delays have caused no real problems. “We’ve been gearing up well ahead of this, and the fact that it has taken a little longer really hasn’t changed anything from our standpoint,” Philhours said.

A competing convention center near Interstate 555 in Jonesboro appears to be in deep trouble just eight months after breaking ground. The Hyatt Place Hotel & Convention Center, unaffiliated with A-State, faces nearly $900,000 in liens from unpaid contractors.

A-State sees the Embassy Suites project as a place where students can serve as interns, absorbing hotel and restaurant operations and working closely with hotel, restaurant and convention marketing executives.

Philhours said that the hospitality management emphasis was designed to be ramped up slowly. “Now we’re offering a management degree with an emphasis on hospitality management,” rather than a specific major in hospitality. “That is a typical way we start our programs,” Philhours said, citing a degree program in global supply chain management that began, like hospitality, as an area of emphasis for a more general management diploma.

No specific construction start or completion date was ever set for the hotel and convention center at Red Wolf Boulevard and Alumni Drive, said Jeff Hankins, A-State’s vice president for strategic communications and economic development. “I wouldn’t characterize it as delays,” he wrote in an email. “O’Reilly Hospitality is awaiting approval from the city to begin construction, and then a completion timetable will be established. With these new facilities, the quality Embassy Suites brand and the O’Reilly Hospitality Partnership, we believe the hospitality management program will help us to recruit and educate students interested in this growing professional field.”

$6 Billion Industry
Hospitality is a $6 billion industry in Arkansas, second only to agriculture, and it employs more than 100,000 Arkansans. That’s about 9 percent of the workforce, according to Rolf Wilkin, founder of northwest Arkansas’ Eureka Pizza chain and the new chairman of the Arkansas Hospitality Association board.

Nationwide, nearly 13 million people work in the industry, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and hundreds of thousands of those jobs are in management.

Hospitality education programs, particularly focusing on the culinary arts, have also surged in Arkansas and nationwide. Pulaski Technical College, Northwest Arkansas Community College and Ozarka College in Melbourne were among the early leaders in the state.

A-State hopes to offer the added dimensions of hotel management and convention marketing, following the lead of top hospitality programs like those at Michigan State, which founded its School of Hospitality Business in 1927; Cornell University; the University of Nevada at Las Vegas; and Virginia Tech.

Graduates compete for management jobs at not just hotels and restaurants, but also at event-planning firms, theme parks, resorts, tourism agencies, cruise lines and casinos.

“It’s a growing and particularly relevant field in Arkansas and around the world,” Philhours said. “We’ve looked at what other universities have done and talked to many professionals. A lot of our alumni in the business world have expressed interest in helping. We anticipate that when the convention center opens, our students will get to know every operation, from housekeeping and maintenance to accounting, customer service, sales and marketing.”

Many of the academic details of the hospitality program are already in place at A-State, and Philhours, who has taught at the university for 32 years, said the course of study will include a heavier load of internships.

“When conversation first began about a convention center on campus, we realized it would be an opportunity for the university and an opportunity for our students,” she said. “We can offer students another avenue of specialization, with a management degree and additional training and internships focused on hospitality. We’ll be offering courses in hospitality law and hospitality accounting, courses specializing in advertising for hotels and conventions. This all fits in perfectly with the College of Business.”

O’Reilly’s Jonesboro Hotel Partners LLC will operate the convention center, leasing space from Arkansas State, which will not charge rent for the first three years. Afterward, the lease calls for the university to collect $250,000 a year through the ninth year of operation, plus 10 percent of revenue. For the 10th year and thereafter, rent increases will be based on the Consumer Price Index.

Competing Projects
The campus complex, which will include 40,000 SF of meeting space, will go up whether or not a crosstown rival rises, O’Reilly said. Feasibility studies have suggested that one convention center could contribute as much as $50 million a year to the local economy, but that figure doesn’t factor in the effects of a convention competitor.

The other planned complex, the $30 million Hyatt Place Hotel & Convention Center on Browns Lane Access Road, has raised “some serious red flags” by failing to pay contractors. The Hyatt project is backed by the Jonesboro Advertising & Promotion Commission, which appears ready to rescind a funding agreement if developer Chris Keller doesn’t answer questions soon about his financing.

“Our project is of a different size, and a different scope,” O’Reilly said. While the campus project is likely to focus on attracting academic conferences and athletic events, O’Reilly said officials are eager to accommodate all customers. “Our target is everything,” he told Arkansas Business. “Every piece of business we can book.”

Questions about the competing center are beside the point for Arkansas State officials, even though the loss of one convention project might be seen as the other’s gain. Concerns have been raised on whether a city of 75,000 can support two convention centers, even in an outsize regional commercial hub like Jonesboro. “We remain confident that the convention center and hotel site on the A-State campus is ideal for the region, city and university,” Hankins said, noting that it is adjacent to the university’s Convocation Center, Fowler Center for performing arts and Centennial Bank Stadium. “The campus site is also the most suitable one for our students and faculty who will be involved with the hospitality management program.”

An opening time frame has been set for Zin Wine Bar’s planned second location, at the Market Place Shopping Center at 11121 North Rodney Parham Road.

Co-owner Troy Deal hopes to open Zin No. 2 by the end of May and will be employing five to 10 employees.

The 2,000-SF bar will have the same hours as the Zin in downtown Little Rock and similar food and wine offerings, but will also have a party room that can accommodate groups of up to 30 or 40.

Deal is a partner in the second Zin with Michael Puckett and Jeffrey Owens.

Their investment so far is around $125,000, Deal said.

Texas Roadhouse, the steakhouse restaurant company based in Louisville, Kentucky, is opening its new Benton location on July 17 and will begin hiring June 17. The 7,100 SF-store will be the company’s fourth restaurant in Arkansas, but it’s not necessarily done.

That’s according to Travis Doster, the senior director of PR for Texas Roadhouse and “a proud graduate of the University of Arkansas.”

Doster says the company is looking to open restaurants in at least three other cities in Arkansas. “Our restaurants in Arkansas have done really well,” he said. “Arkansas is a hidden gem.” The location in Little Rock, for example, had sales of more than $4 million in 2014, the last year for which figures are publicly available.

The Benton store will be at 20280 Interstate 30 North. Doster said the high-visibility location is intentional. “Texas Roadhouse doesn’t advertise nationally,” he said. “You’ll never see us on TV.” The buildings themselves, with their bright neon signs and flags, serve as advertisements.

“We like to call ourselves a collection of independent restaurants,” he added, because the managing partner of each location has ownership in that store. “They pay us $25,000 and in return they get 10 percent of the operating profits,” Doster said.

Texas Roadhouse, which is traded on the Nasdaq (TXRH), reported revenue of almost $2 billion in 2016, a 10 percent increase over 2015. Texas Roadhouse has 460 locations in 49 states and five locations in the Middle East, and 90 percent of them are company owned.

“Everything we do is made from scratch, which is very labor-intensive, so we’ll hire about 200 employees” for the Benton location, Doster said. “We have on-site meat-cutters, bakers. We bake our own bread. We cut our own meat in-house.”

Texas Roadhouse encourages its restaurants to become involved in their communities. “They support Little Leagues, Special Olympics, various nonprofit organizations,” Doster said. That activity in the community also helps advertise the restaurants.

Keith Smith is the managing partner of the Benton Texas Roadhouse.

The Old Post Office building in the Fayetteville downtown square is for sale, and its star tenant is soon to be on the move.

Fayetteville OPO LLC, led by Jim Huson, has placed the 13,500-SF building on the market for a cool $3.18 million. Huson, who owns Doe’s Eat Place in Fayetteville, purchased the Old Post Office for $1.3 million in 2013.

The building, at 1 W. Center St., is listed with Steve Fineberg & Associates by Steve Fineberg and Ethan Tisdale.

The OPO’s main tenant is Hayseed Ventures, a company founded by John James that works to help entrepreneurs turn startups into successful businesses. James also founded Acumen Brands, the online retail company that was the OPO’s first tenant after Huson bought the place.

Acumen Brands opened a Country Outfitter, which sells Western wear, at the location, but two years later Acumen closed the store. James had by that time left Acumen Brands and started Hayseed Ventures, which was operating out of the OPO. When Country Outfitter left, Hayseed took over the entire building.

Hayseed Ventures works on site with its portfolio of companies, which include Menguin, Scrub Shopper and QuBowl. James said Huson has been a great landlord, and he already has a new place picked out for Hayseed Ventures, which he said he would announce later.

James said Huson alerted him that he was planning to sell the OPO, and James said Hayseed has been wanting to move for “quite some time.” Hayseed Ventures’ lease with the OPO expires this summer.

“It’s an incredible building, but Hayseed and its portfolio companies have outgrown the space in many ways,” James said in a text. “The companies we helped start in the OPO already have well over 100 employees. I hope our next location is just as fruitful.”

Apartments, an industrial project and a store in Little Rock along with a dental development in Bryant and a closed restaurant in Conway all topped the $1 million sales mark.

• Meadowcrest Apartments LLC, led by Don Marshall Jr., sold its namesake 122-unit complex at 5315 Stanley Drive to Colonial Park RBG LLC of West Plains, Missouri, for $2.8 million.

• Ty Garments USA LLC, an affiliate of Suzhou Industrial Park Tianyuan Garments Co. Ltd. of China, bought the 89,516-SF 8909 Fourche Dam Pike project for more than $1.8 million.

Seller? Joseph T. Ryerson & Son Inc. of Chicago.

• The Alice Flynn 2005 Living Trust of Aptos, California, purchased the 3,500-SF Aspen Dental project at 23021 Interstate 30 from NRE Bryant LLC of Fort Worth, Texas, for nearly $1.8 million.

• River Valley Lodging LLC, led by Chet Patel and Rocky Govind, acquired the former Ruby Tuesday project at 2400 Sanders Road for nearly $1.4 million.

Seller: RT Western Missouri Franchise LLC of Maryville, Tennessee.

• GRT Little Rock DG LLC of San Rafael, California, bought the 9,360-SF Dollar General Store at 4748 Springer Blvd. from Rosebud Springer LLC of Huntington Beach, California.

Price? More than $1.2 million.