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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.
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.
Hardly. It sounds as though they started buying within the same week as the announcement. The deal would have been locked in, but a few people probably got a slight heads up, especially if they were expected to relocate for their job.
If you’re going to use this as a line in the sand instead of all manner of other corporate malfeasance, then I’m not really sure what to make if you. This deals like some kind of manufactured outrage.
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.
I think it depends if they bought it for their own use or if they bought to resell based on that information.
No, this does not matter at all. The only thing that matters is whether it involves securities regulated by the SEC.
New York apartments don't fall under the SEC's jurisdiction, unless they are part of a REIT.
How is this not insider trading? Buying real estate using information not known to the public should result in prosecution. Martha Stewart served jail time for less.
According to the SEC , As defined by the courts, illegal insider trading refers to purchasing or selling a security while in possession of material, non-public information concerning that security, where the information is obtained from a breach of fiduciary duty, or a duty arising from a relationship of trust or confidence.
So, since real estate is not a security, that is how this is not insider trading. And by the way, Martha Stewart was not convicted of insider trading; she was found guilty in March 2004 of felony charges of conspiracy, obstruction of an agency proceeding, and making false statements to federal investigators.
Or maybe it was just executives with inside information getting in before the lowly workers started driving up real estate prices in the neighborhood. Seems ethically pretty similar to insider share trading to me, even if it is not illegal.
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?
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Yeah, I don't get that complaint, either. This isn't at all like buying stock based on knowledge of what a company is about to do.
if a company announces that it is going to do something amazing in two years, that company's stock will rise immediately on expectation of that future profit, thanks to rampant speculation and broad global demand. The information, when it becomes public knowledge, has an immediate and significant effect on the market.
By contrast, Amazon's new headquarters will increase housing prices, but not immediately. If they broke ground today, the new headquarters probably wouldn't open until at least a couple of years from now, and demand for housing won't increase much until shortly before that, because most employees won't know that they are going to be transferring until they do (unless they really want to move to NYC and are relatively certain that they'll still be at Amazon in two years and know that a position will be available at that location in a product area that interests them).
Thus, knowing the decision a couple of weeks early almost certainly did not financially benefit those employees in any meaningful way (except, perhaps, by avoiding extortion by unscrupulous sellers trying to take advantage of their knowledge of a few Amazon facilities staffers' need to move in quickly).
In short, they almost certainly did nothing wrong.
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I love how people can non-ironically call for echo chambers. You people really do spend all your energy on removing thought you disagree with, don't you? It must be a nasty surprise to come in to a website where you encounter dissident views. It's telling that your natural response is, instead of engaging with such views, is to remove them from view.
They tried that, you know...it didn't work. Without accurate information (dissidents telling you where you're going wrong) your whole society goes off the rails. George Orwell goes into this in "1984" - but in his society, people like you successfully suppressed all dissent.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This isn't at all like buying stock based on knowledge of what a company is about to do.
This is sort of like insider stock trading in that non-public information was use for financial gain. However, it's not illegal in the same sense that insider stock trading wasn't illegal before SEC regulations made it illegal. When Kennedy made his fortune based on insider stock trading, it wasn't illegal. It only became illegal after he became the SEC head and made it illegal from that point onward.
Meh, /. has always had their share of goatse posts and misc junk floating at -1. The signal-to-noise ratio looks worse mainly because the signal is weak, as a news aggregation it always sucked but the comments/discussions used to be great. Now it's mostly loons that don't have the sense to leave, like me. I feel like I'm clinging on because I don't want an era to end, kinda how I still watch the Simpsons even though they've grown stale a long time ago.
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If I had the money to invest, and I knew there was a 50:50 chance the company might move there, and prices go up regardless, then it would be worth making the purchase either way.
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About 11% of Americans move each year. That's about 35.5 million people.
About 264,000 people moved to NYC last year. So about 0.74% of all movers relocated to NYC.
Amazon has about 600,000 employees. I can't find a breakdown of U.S. vs overseas employees, but about 70% of their sales are in the U.S.. So figure 420,000 U.S. employees. If 11% of them move, that'd be 46,000 Amazon employees moving each year.. 0.74% of that is 340 Amazon employees moving to NYC each year.
Of that amount, most would rent. But it seems highly likely that more than two would end up buying.
I use up all my MOD points on off-topic and troll posts.
Here's an idea, instead of modding down stuff you don't like, why not make the decision to only mod up things that are interesting? Even if you don't agree with the argument being made, at least it can generate some good debate.
Down-modding creating a debate-free monoculture is the biggest issue for Slashdot right now. I'm not blaming you, I accept you are modding legitimately bad posts, I'm just saying that rather than being the janitor you have an opportunity to reverse the decline.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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