As Amazon searches for HQ2, site-finding experts land in town

SEATTLE — Amazon kicked off a continentwide bidding war early this month when it announced it was seeking a second headquarters outside Seattle.

This week, by coincidence, the brokers for such deals arrived in the city.

The Site Selectors Guild, a trade group whose members pitch themselves as consultants for companies seeking new sites to place plants or buy some office space, gathered at a downtown Seattle hotel this week.

The occasion was an annual meeting, a chance to network with colleagues and an audience of public sector economic-development officials.

Overshadowing the event was Amazon’s ongoing hunt for “HQ2,” the new corporate campus the retailer aims to place somewhere in North America. The surprise announcement this month by the Seattle company promised 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in investment — the biggest economic-development prize in memory — and attracted, at last count, more than 130 interested bidders.

Unfortunately for the consultants assembled in Seattle, Amazon is apparently using its own resources. Location consultants say that, with the exception of its data-center business, Amazon tends to use its own staff to evaluate office-space decisions.

“I wish they’d bring one of us in,” said Mark Williams, chairman of the trade group.

Amazon declined to comment.

Speculation on Amazon’s options dominated chatter on the sidelines of the conference. There was little consensus.

Places with a large workforce to staff the place?

“That’s a lot of people for a laborshed to provide,” Williams said of Amazon’s hiring aims. “I’m not sure how a city of 200,000 even registers. It’s like you need New York, or Tokyo, or Los Angeles.”

Jim Renzas, of RSH Group, speculated that Amazon would likely choose a low-tax city and state, ideally a spot that appeals to tech workers, like Nashville, Tenn., or Denver.

Austin, Texas? “Austin is in that bucket, although it’s pretty congested,” he said. And, Renzas added, its airport isn’t the best.

This crowd knows the strengths and weaknesses of the nation’s cities by heart.

Seattle, for its rising cost of living, housing shortage and traffic problems, is an attractive market for corporate America, consultants said.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee kicked off the proceedings Tuesday with his pitch to the audience of corporate gatekeepers to consider the state. His staff figures about 60 businesses with ongoing site searches may land in the state.

Washington, Inslee said, was the best state for businesses, citing a “light touch regulatory system” and probusiness tax regime.

“No. 2,” he said, “Is Pickens County, S.C.”

The joke was a nod to posters plastering the breakfast nook set up in a corner of the Fairmount Hotel. Placards touted Pickens County’s business-friendly climate and expertise in the solar-power industry.

Many of the event’s sponsors and the trade group’s membership hail from the Southeast, a hotbed of activity for site-location consultants and the government economic-development groups that sit on the other side of the table.

Facing the decline of traditional industries and a small manufacturing base, states from the Carolinas to Louisiana have spent decades recruiting companies based elsewhere, courting factories from the Midwest and, later, outposts from foreign automakers and aerospace companies.

Their reach stretches to the Northwest, too. Boeing’s decision to start work on the 787 Dreamliner in Everett, Wash., and its subsequent search that landed on North Charleston, S.C., as a second site for building the planes, were brokered by members of the Site Selectors Guild.

Now, the race is on for another homegrown Seattle company.