Historic Central Avenue
Downtown's tourist-facing storefronts near Bathhouse Row — specialty retail, galleries, and restaurants in historic buildings, driven by visitor foot traffic and events.
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Storefronts & office space
Retail corridors & office space
Two very different retail worlds — a walkable historic downtown and a car-oriented highway strip — plus the office space that serves a tourism-and-healthcare economy.
Two retail spines, two different games
Retail in Hot Springs really splits into two worlds. Historic Central Avenue downtown is the tourist-facing spine: the district running alongside Bathhouse Row, full of specialty shops, galleries, restaurants, and small-format storefronts in historic buildings. Demand here rides on visitor foot traffic and events, and space is characterful but constrained by the historic building stock. Our downtown guide goes deeper on that district.
The second world is the Highway 7 / Central Avenue commercial corridor running south, a more conventional car-oriented strip of national and regional retail, service businesses, and shopping centers stretching toward the Hot Springs Mall area. This is where you find the big-box, drive-to retail that serves residents year-round rather than tourists. The two corridors reward completely different tenants and formats, so match your concept to the right one.
The corridors
Where retail concentrates
Location dictates the tenant, the format, and the customer here more than almost anywhere.
Highway 7 / Central strip
The car-oriented commercial corridor running south — service businesses, shopping centers, and national retail serving residents year-round, out toward the Hot Springs Mall area.
Hot Springs Mall area
The regional shopping node anchoring the south end of the strip; surrounding pad and inline space serves a broad drive-to trade area. Confirm current anchors and vacancy locally.
Neighborhood centers
Smaller centers and freestanding buildings scattered along the arterials serve daily-needs retail — groceries, pharmacies, quick-service — for the resident base.
Office space in a service economy
Hot Springs isn't a big Class-A office town, but there is steady demand for professional and medical office space tied to the local economy. Medical office clusters near the hospitals and along the main corridors, supported by the healthcare sector we describe in our market overview. Beyond that, office demand comes from law, accounting, insurance, real estate, and the services that support tourism and local government. Historic downtown buildings also convert to characterful office and mixed-use space, sometimes with the help of rehabilitation incentives covered in our investing and leasing guide.
Because the office market is thin relative to big metros, individual buildings and their condition matter more than any market-wide average. We don't publish specific rents or vacancy figures; a local broker can give you current asking rents, tenant-improvement norms, and realistic absorption for the type of space you're after.
Watch
Downtown retail in action
The visitor foot traffic that underwrites Central Avenue storefronts.
Shoppers Flock to Downtown Hot SpringsLocal newsLooking for the right storefront?
Tell us your concept — tourist-facing downtown or drive-to highway retail — and we'll steer you to the corridor and the brokers that fit it.
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