Some Amazon Employees Bought NYC Condos Before News of HQ2 Location Emerged, Says WSJ Report (thehill.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: At least two Amazon employees reportedly purchased condos in a New York City neighborhood before news emerged that the area had been picked to host the company's second headquarters. The employees decided to buy units in a new 11-story condo building in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens just before the first reports of Amazon's HQ2 location were released this month, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. While employees of companies are barred from buying or selling stocks based on information that has not yet been made public, lawyers told the Journal that they were unaware of any such ban affecting real estate transactions. 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. Earlier this month, Amazon announced plans to split its second headquarters evenly between New York's Long Island City and Arlington County's Crystal City neighborhoods.

Comments

Code of Conduct

[eric31415927]

This sort of problem has arisen before and solved by requiring people knowing about big deals (i.e. accountants and lawyers) having to abide by codes of conduct within their professional associations. Even the appearance of a conflict of interest should be avoided to stay onside.
I wonder if Google employees in general have such codes of conduct written into their employment contracts.

no problems here

[renegade600]

don't blame the employees for buying condos before the announcement. I have no problems with this as long as the purchase was for their own use and not to resell after the announcement.

Re:What professional associations?

[dgatwood]

No, it almost certainly isn't. They're building a headquarters. Buildings don't go up overnight. Nobody buys a new house based on hoping that they will get transferred in two or three years.

If it is engineers, it is because they're leaving Amazon to work at some other company in New York, and the timing is a fluke. Amazon has over 613k employees. That's an area of NYC with a lot of new construction, which makes it an attractive location for people on tech salaries to live. There's a lot of tech in NYC. So I could easily see this happening entirely by chance. (Admittedly, only a small percentage of those employees are tech workers, but there's nothing stopping non-tech workers from moving there, either, notwithstanding the cost.)

That said, it is more likely that there are Amazon (facilities) employees who are going to be overseeing work on the new headquarters (and then staying on permanently as the facilities reps in the new location). It makes perfect sense for them to start planning their moves as soon as the plans are solid, so that they won't have to spend months in a hotel.

And further (I'm responding more to the GP post than to your comment here), even if we assume that it was somebody who overheard the new location in the hallway, it still would not be a conflict of interest to act on it. How could Amazon's interests possibly be harmed by some of their employees owning homes near their new location?