Landing Amazon HQ2 could grow Atlanta home prices up to 7 percent, study finds

The supposed corporate windfall of a generation, Amazon’s HQ2, could hypothetically have a seismic impact on the housing markets of several finalist cities, in terms of rent and home values.

For others, 50,000 additional tech workers pulling six figures would’t be such a big deal.

Earlier this year, Apartment List found that rents in apartment-happy Atlanta would swell even more quickly with the addition of HQ2 (by an additional .5 to .7 percent annually), but not to the degree of rental scenes in competitors from Baltimore to California.

Owners.com

This week Owners.com, a tech-enabled national real estate brokerage based in Atlanta, released a study on the homeownership side of the HQ2 equation.

Using US Census and Data USA statistics, and a predictive model built of UC Berkeley research, analysts attempted to predict HQ2’s impact on home prices.

In a worst/best case scenario, home values in metro Atlanta would swell by 6.9 percent—in addition to current growth—with the Amazon hub in town.

That’s the seventh lowest “upper projection” increase among finalist cities.

Contrast that against metro New York’s upper projection for home-price boosts (just 1.9 percent) and that of Raleigh (holy smokes—33.8 percent!) for an idea of how vastly different HQ2 impact could be, per the findings.

How so?

“Larger cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Toronto may not see as much of an impact on home values, as they are better able to absorb the influx of employees from a housing perspective,” analysts wrote, in summation.

Meanwhile, though, “smaller cities like Indianapolis, Nashville, Raleigh, and Pittsburgh could have a much larger impact on home values, [but] these areas tend to have lower home prices, so the ultimate effect on home values may not be huge.”

Here’s a look at how Atlanta’s housing might fare against its rivals:

Owners.com

• How landing Amazon’s HQ2 could impact Atlanta renters [Curbed]