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carbocation

To understand whether this is even anomalous, you need to know:

- How many Amazon employees already live in NYC or are already planned for relocation there for non-HQ2 things.

- The frequency at which a typical person around there buys new condos

Without knowing those, it's hard to have priors, or to begin to decide whether this is a departure from those priors.

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They speak to this right in the article.

> but the Journal reports that one brokerage firm sold nearly 150 units just last week, 15 times its normal volume.

That's the number in the week after the announcement, by my reading.

> Amazon announced last week that it would be splitting its second headquarters between Long Island City in Queens and Arlington County, Va., ending months of jockeying between cities and speculation of where the tech giant would land.

> There are no exact numbers on how many units have gone into contract in the Long Island City area since the announcement, but the Journal reports that one brokerage firm sold nearly 150 units just last week, 15 times its normal volume.

I personally find that claim dubious since I don't think there are 150 units available in all of LIC and it takes a non-trivial amount of time to buy a condo. So for 150 to sell in a week that means there must be 300+ in flight which is basically impossible. Plus for a single firm to do that means there must be, what, 5x as many across other firms which comes out to 1500+. I somehow doubt that 20+% of LIC's total condos are in the process of being sold within a few weeks.

Exactly. Plus, the neighborhood has Thousands of new apartments coming to the market already well before any sort of HQ2 search. Seems like A LOT of people are moving there.

https://ny.curbed.com/maps/long-island-city-development-boom...

Amazon already has like 2000 employees in NYC. The own a building on 34th St. They also announced their intent to lease space in Hudson Yards months ago.

Slow down there Critical Thinker. You can't consider such fundamental questions while creating clickbait.

How is this clickbait? Neither the headline not the article allege any anomaly or misdeeds. It's basic, factual reporting.

How is it not? There is definitely an implication...they even discuss the legality of it. Amazon employees have purchased hundreds of thousands of pieces of real estate over the years, how many articles were published discussing individual transactions?

"Apple Employees buy a home in SJC before iPhone launch" "Goldman Sachs Employee buys home in TriBeCa during bonus season" is not something you read regularly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/business/that-line-at-the...

I think "Line at the Ferrari dealer" is pure clickbait.

Additionally, this is talking about a macro trend across an industry, while the current article is talking about 2 employees out of hundreds of thousands.

The article from 15 years ago is also not discussing the legality.

It's kind of like yelling "Fire!" in a building, only to say "surely there's a fire somewhere in the city".

Or like yelling “Fire! Run!” because there is a fire in the fireplace.

So your case is they are stating the obvious? And that now qualifies as news worthy of publication? And they're publishing it not as a (meaningless) public service but because they know ppl will click to read it.

I trust you can do the math from here.

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