Zillow Study Says Boston’s Amazon HQ2 Chances Are Dwindling
The real estate company's voters point to Atlanta or the Washington, D.C., suburbs as the most likely spot for the company's new headquarters.
Photo via iStock/JAHCOTTONTAIL143
Boston, experts say, is Amazon’s bridesmaid—not its bride.
Despite the e-commerce giant’s growing footprint in the Hub, which will likely soon include a massive 430,000-square-foot office in the Seaport and an extra 2,000 jobs, economics and housing gurus say Boston will not win Amazon’s HQ2 lottery.
According to a new study from the real estate company Zillow, Atlanta, with its lower rents and newer infrastructure, and Northern Virginia, which boasts easy access to the Capitol’s power players, have the best odds of landing Amazon’s second home. Just three out of 80 panelists said Boston would win the competition for HQ2, while four voters said we had the worst shot at it (it is unclear at this time if those four people are Yankees fans). All told, Zillow’s respondents ranked us tied with Washington, D.C., as the 12th most-likely metropolis to score the office. What nerve!
Though the voters acknowledged Boston has a “large, highly skilled labor pool,” they knocked us for being an expensive city that’s difficult for renters (fair, honestly). But the Zillow respondents also have a problem with our geography. Apparently being on the coast causes “transportation problems” that are not palatable to Alexa and co. Eight of the 20 finalists for HQ2 are along the Atlantic Ocean. There’s also the issue that Boston is “too far north,” according to the experts. Someone please alert George R.R. Martin, because Winterfell has apparently been in Massachusetts all along.
Despite our low ranking, we did manage to edge out several other cities, including Miami, New York, Newark, and Los Angeles, which are the four finalists least likely to get the nod from Amazon, according to the survey.
Amazon plans to announce the location of its second headquarters by the end of 2018.
