Suffolk County home buyer prices surge after Amazon HQ2 announcement

Dec - 19 2018 | By James Baker

It will be years before the full effect of Amazon’s HQ2 on area real estate can be grasped, but there are already some trends in the market that indicate how it will change in the coming months and years.

In the wake of the company’s November announcement that it would open a second campus in Long Island City, prices have stopped falling and started rising in the Queens waterfront enclave, while neighborhoods as far afield as Forest Hills have started being advertised for their proximity to the forthcoming campus.

StreetEasy has released a new report on how the HQ2 announcement has affected city real estate to date. The real estate search engine found that Long Island City’s housing prices are rising in the wake of Amazon’s HQ2 announcement, but the Queens neighborhood isn’t the primary one that real estate agents are marketing to campus hopefuls.

Midtown East has the most mention of HQ2 in real estate listings, with 42 touting the neighborhood’s proximity to Long Island City. Astoria is the neighborhood with the second most mentions of HQ2 in listing text, with just six listings touting its accessibility to Long Island City. The HQ2 neighborhood itself has just three listings that sing Amazon’s presence.

Long Island City listings, however, have seen the most drastic price shifts since November. Along with a sizable grouping of price increases following the announcement, there was also a decline in listing price cuts. It was a night-and-day change: This comes after a slump that in October saw 13 percent of listings slash their prices.

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In the five weeks leading up to the announcement, StreetEasy found that not a single listing in Long Island City raised its price. In the five weeks following the announcement, just five Long Island City listings (or 2.7 percent of them) saw a decline in price.

Those price adjustments are still mostly confined to Long Island City. In Astoria, four listings saw a price increase in the five weeks following the announcement, but in the same period of time 25 listings saw their prices slashed.