Sandy Paul
ARLINGTON, VA—When Amazon unceremoniously pulled its headquarters investment from Long Island City yesterday, questions naturally turned to what it could mean for Arlington, the second location for its duel headquarters. 'It must mean good things, right?', or so the local thinking went. After all, Amazon just pulled the plug on about 25,000 high-paying jobs and they have to be filled somewhere. Isn't Arlington the natural answer?
The answer, unfortunately for the area, is that it won't be getting those jobs, at least in the short run. Local officials noted, with some disappointment, that Amazon has indicated it won't be increasing the scope of the Arlington operations. It also indicated that it won't reopen its headquarters search.
Perhaps for that reason, the region does stand to benefit from Amazon's decision in the longer run, says Sandy Paul, senior managing director of National Research for Newmark Knight Frank.
“The main reason it split the requirement [between two locations for a headquarters] was that it was concerned about finding enough tech talent in one location for these jobs,” he tells GlobeSt.com. For that reason, he continues, “it is extremely unlikely that Amazon will move all of its New York plans to Arlington. But as long as the local region continues to make plans to build out operations and related infrastructure, I think we will see some of the New York jobs move here.”
Other jobs will likely be moved to Nashville, the third location meant to support Amazon's headquarters, Paul adds. Additional jobs will probably be placed in other cities in existing or perhaps new hubs.
One factor working to Amazon's advantage is the enormous amount of data it collected during its high-profile search for a new headquarters. That will surely help the e-commerce giant in identifying tech hubs around the country where talent is plentiful, or at least affordable.
Unfortunately for Amazon there is no replacing New York with its breadth and depth of technology expertise.
According to the recently-released Savills Tech Cities ranking, New York is the world's foremost center for tech; its business environment, talent pool, lifestyle and transport links make it an ideal site for businesses. New York even topped San Francisco, which ranked 2nd, dragged down by the world's highest co-working costs.
There are other locations around the world if Amazon were willing to consider a global headquarters. London ranked 3rd globally for several reasons, followed by Amsterdam.
Boston rounded out the top five tech cities in the world.
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Erika Morphy
Erika Morphy has been writing about commercial real estate at GlobeSt.com for more than ten years, covering the capital markets, the Mid-Atlantic region and national topics. She's a nerd so favorite examples of the former include accounting standards, Basel III and what Congress is brewing.
