fbpx

The E-Commerce Giant: HQ2

By Darcie Lunsford

How do you get a noisy room packed with 70 of South Florida’s top commercial real estate brokers to pipe down?

“Who wants an update on the Amazon headquarters deal?” Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward Alliance Vice President David Coddington asks, almost rhetorically, as he steps to the microphone at an Oct. 19 meeting of the South Florida Office Brokers Association.

The question prompts a near-sudden hush, and neck-jerking turns toward the podium.

“Today is the deadline to submit,” Coddington continues. He then elaborates that South Florida’s three economic development agencies, in coordination with the state, have been in failure-is-not-an-option mode to get the region into the site consideration mix ever since Amazon unveiled its open-bid competition in early September for its second headquarters, dubbed simply HQ2.

This call for proposals created a dog-whistle-like pursuit to woo the e-commerce goliath as the largest economic development prize of the century. Any metropolitan area in North America can pitch itself, as long as it has more than 1 million people and a pro-business climate.

South Florida, which offered up eight sites—from downtown Miami to Doral, to west Broward, to as far north as Palm Beach County, is among 238 cities, regions, states and Canadian provinces to respond to Amazon’s eight-page RFP. 

“It is really a brilliant marketing move,” Coddington says, referring the attention and free press that the monster project is spurring, and will continue to, as it reviews proposals and marches toward a 2018 decision.

The stats are startling, and a potential game changer for the lucky winner of HQ2:

• 50,000 fulltime, direct jobs, with an annual average wage of more than $100,000.

• $5 billion investment in its new corporate facilities, which will be phased up to as large as 8 million square feet over a 15-year period. That is comparable in scale to its existing downtown Seattle headquarters, which spans 33 buildings and 8.1 million square feet.

And since Amazon has shrewdly positioned HQ2 as an equal to its Seattle headquarters, it can more credibly demonstrate the direct and indirect economic yields to the recipient area, beyond the typical pie-in-the-sky economic-model studies.

Remember Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, when Gov. Jeb Bush touted an economic impact study to justify giving the San Diego-based research center more than $500 million in state and county incentives in 2003? It was supposed to launch a dynamically evolving biotech cluster that would create tens of thousands of high-wage jobs. The reality has not lived up to the study’s economic-output hype.

Expectations for the broader impact of Amazon’s HQ2, however, can be more reasonably based on what happened in Seattle, where it has 40,000 employees—as long as the company does what it says. Its effect on Seattle, according the company’s RFP, has been:

• $3.7 billion investment in buildings and infrastructure

• $25.7 billion paid in employee wages

• 233,000 hotel nights by Amazon employees and guests in 2016

• $43 million paid into the city’s public transportation system

• 53,000 indirect jobs

• $38 billion in spinoff investment

• Local increase in Fortune 500 companies with research and engineering operations, from seven to 31 as of this year.

The e-commerce giant says it will consider retrofitting an existing structure, but doubts that an older building will be sufficient to meet its needs. As such, it will prioritize shovel-ready sites and infill development locations with the infrastructure to meet its requirements:

• 500,000 square feet for phase one, with plans to ramp up to 8 million square feet

• Within two miles of major highways

• 45 minutes from an international airport

• On-site access to mass transit

While South Florida’s economic development officials are optimistic about the region’s chances, local developers are less so. They might be the most measured, pragmatic voices in the discussion.

“It would be an unbelievably big boost to the economy,” says veteran Miami developer Ford Gibson, managing director of Foundry Commercial. “I think we are lacking in affordable housing and mass transit.”

Adds a Broward developer: “I don’t know if South Florida has the depth of tech people and advanced degrees that Amazon has gotten more into hiring. We are definitely a long shot.”

Freelance writer Darcie Lunsford is a former real estate editor of the South Florida Business Journal. She is the senior VP for leasing at Butters Group and is avoiding a conflict of interest in her column by not covering her own deals.

You May Also Like
State Legislature Drops the Job Growth Ball

By Gary Press   With Florida facing historically high unemployment because of the COVID-19 pandemic, one would think our state government would be pulling out all of the stops to

Read More
Rethinking Sales Today

Today, more organizations increasingly are facing more competition, rapidly changing technology, slower market growth and less product differentiation. This trend requires business development professionals to manage more accounts, build stronger

Read More
The Future of the Office

[vc_row css_animation=”” row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” angled_section=”no” text_align=”left” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern”][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text] As I talked to my many office tenants in the first few weeks of the national shutdown, they were pleasantly surprised

Read More
Is your sales manager managing time well?

Is your sales manager balancing priorities properly? How do you know? Today a big question faced by most executives is, what is my sales manager doing and what should he

Read More
Other Posts
And Justice For All

By Monica St. Omer   Monica St. Omer has been working with me for eight years. She is my right-hand but so much more. She is a wonderful soul who

Read More
Keeping us connected

As a company that doesn’t directly serve the general public, SBA Communications might be called the quiet giant of the South Florida business scene even thought it’s on the S&P

Read More
Lessons learned

As I write this column, South Florida has yet to enter into a phase one reopening, lagging the rest of the state. I hope readers and their businesses are negotiating

Read More
The Unseen Enemy

[vc_row css_animation=”” row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” angled_section=”no” text_align=”left” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern”][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text] As I wrote my column in March for the April issue, the COVID-19 virus was just starting to wreak havoc in

Read More

Drew Limsky

Drew Limsky

Editor-in-Chief

BIOGRAPHY

Drew Limsky joined Lifestyle Media Group in August 2020 as Editor-in-Chief of South Florida Business & Wealth. His first issue of SFBW, October 2020, heralded a reimagined structure, with new content categories and a slew of fresh visual themes. “As sort of a cross between Forbes and Robb Report, with a dash of GQ and Vogue,” Limsky says, “SFBW reflects South Florida’s increasingly sophisticated and dynamic business and cultural landscape.”

Limsky, an avid traveler, swimmer and film buff who holds a law degree and Ph.D. from New York University, likes to say, “I’m a doctor, but I can’t operate—except on your brand.” He wrote his dissertation on the nonfiction work of Joan Didion. Prior to that, Limsky received his B.A. in English, summa cum laude, from Emory University and earned his M.A. in literature at American University in connection with a Masters Scholar Award fellowship.

Limsky came to SFBW at the apex of a storied career in journalism and publishing that includes six previous lead editorial roles, including for some of the world’s best-known brands. He served as global editor-in-chief of Lexus magazine, founding editor-in-chief of custom lifestyle magazines for Cadillac and Holland America Line, and was the founding editor-in-chief of Modern Luxury Interiors South Florida. He also was the executive editor for B2B magazines for Acura and Honda Financial Services, and he served as travel editor for Conde Nast. Magazines under Limsky’s editorship have garnered more than 75 industry awards.

He has also written for many of the country’s top newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Boston Globe, USA Today, Worth, Robb Report, Afar, Time Out New York, National Geographic Traveler, Men’s Journal, Ritz-Carlton, Elite Traveler, Florida Design, Metropolis and Architectural Digest Mexico. His other clients have included Four Seasons, Acqualina Resort & Residences, Yahoo!, American Airlines, Wynn, Douglas Elliman and Corcoran. As an adjunct assistant professor, Limsky has taught journalism, film and creative writing at the City University of New York, Pace University, American University and other colleges.