- Amazon is looking for the city that will be home to its second headquarters.
- Cities are jockeying to offer the best deal for Amazon, hoping to lure more jobs and infrastructure development.
- One firm gathered predictions from 18 sources and averaged them to find the city with the best odds at landing HQ2.
- Watch Amazon's stock price trade in real time.
In September, Amazon announced that it would invest $5 billion in developing its next headquarters and it wanted cities to fight each other for a chance to host what would be called HQ2. And fight they did.
Cities have begun offering increasingly outlandish things to try and lure Amazon. Stonecrest, Georgia has offered to rename itself Amazon while several Missouri cities said they would build a Hyperloop to connect several of the state's largest metro areas.
But, putting aside the humorous attempts to woo the e-commerce giant, whichever city Amazon lands in could see a huge impact on its job growth, tax income, infrastructure development, quality of life, and more. It's why Newark, New Jersey has offered $7 billion in tax incentives over the next ten years to host HQ2.
The hunt for HQ2 has led many to speculate on which city would win. The New York Times, Moody's, CNN, CNBC and more have all published their predictions. To make sense of it all, Sperling's BestPlaces, a website that helps users find out where to live next, combined the predictions from 18 different sources.
Sperling's averaged the rankings of all those predictions to come up with a meta-ranking of sorts. The average ranking of each of Sperling's top cities, along with notable sources that gave the city a top ranking, are listed below. Sperling's prediction for the final HQ2 destination is listed at the bottom.
It's worth noting that not all of the predictions that Sterling's studied were formatted the same. Some, like CNN Money's ranking, had more than one first-place finisher.