Amazon is hunting for the location of its second headquarters, called HQ2. The Seattle-based company has a short list of 20 cities that could host HQ2 and housing will be impacted no matter where the company settles.
The economic impact to the chosen city can’t be overestimated, says Ben Sage, director of the Mid-Atlantic region for Metrostudy, which has three markets under consideration for HQ2 by Amazon—Washington, D.C., suburban Maryland, and Northern Virginia.
“If this campus grows to over 50,000 employees and 8 million square feet of office space, it would be larger in size than the combined headquarter campuses of Apple, Google/Alphabet, and Facebook,” he says. Its size would rival two major hubs in Sage’s markets: HQ2 “would exceed the Pentagon’s 6.5 million square feet of office space, and employ almost as many people as Fort Meade," which has approximately 52,000 employees.
Current homeowners in the selected city will reap the benefit of HQ2's impact on home values, and home builders and apartment developers will have plenty of work churning out housing. While HQ2 will be a boom for the chosen city’s economy and its builders and developers, it's likely to be a bust for residents seeking affordable housing.
The data shows that Amazon has contributed to Seattle's soaring housing costs and limited inventory over the past seven years. From 2010 to 2017, the average price of a new single-family home in Seattle increased by 83.4%, nearly two times the rate of growth seen in new-home prices nationally, which increased by 46.3% during the same period.
Follow the link below for more analysis on how housing could be impacted in the cities under consideration for HQ2.
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