Amazon’s 2nd HQ is a Catalyst for Multifamily Real Estate

Bloomberg, New York Times and other expert sources have calculated a guess as to which city will be named Amazon’s second headquarters. Current contenders include Washington D.C., Austin, TX, Boston, MA and Atlanta, GA. USA Today has stated that they expect another round of finalists before Amazon announces the winning bid, which is on track for a December 31, 2018 announcement. This means that hiring and the purchase of real estate will happen in 2019.

Amazon’s announcement will cause an epic shift in the chosen town’s multifamily sector. A new HQ will mean more jobs and more people needing to live in close proximity to their location. Often in industrial areas, you have single-family homes that are zoned for multifamily. The Amazon opportunity allows for many of these single-family homeowners to take advantage of hungry developers and, historically, they sell the properties at better prices than if selling to another homeowner. In a sheer domino effect, other neighborhood businesses, enterprises and entertainment crop up to meet the needs of new tenants.

CityBldr is a new app that uses a machine-learning algorithm to find clusters of single-family homes zoned for multifamily has publically committed to GeekWire that they will open a third office in the same Amazon HQ2 neighborhood. CityBldr founder and CEO Bryan Copley wants to emulate the transformation he saw in his own neighborhood when Amazon first moved into Seattle. Copley believes his company’s algorithm can predict the 19 properties Amazon is most likely to purchase in whatever city it chooses and promises to make that list open source to prove CityBldr’s capability. CityBldr will start its expansion immediately after Amazon’s announcement and is currently predicting Toronto, Canada as the winning city.