What Amazon's arrival means for Long Island City real estate

NEW YORK (FOX5NY.COM) - If those in Long Island City, Queens, failed to recognize the climbing canyons of high-rises and surging rents in their neighborhood as a boom, the arrival of the headquarters of Amazon, the 15th largest private company in the world, should surely convince them.

"People used to make fun of me for living in Long Island City and now people are always trying to crash on my couch," said Lauren Renee Bennett, a licensed real estate broker with the Corcoran Group.

She has lived in long island city for 11, runs the blog and Instagram account LivingLIC.nyc, and even in the weeks leading up to the announcement that Amazon planned to locate 25,000 employees and half its East Coast headquarters to millions of square feet of office space along the Long Island City waterfront, Bennett reported an increase in demand for LIC real estate.

"I've had a huge uptick in the people that come to my listings. The contacts I've had, the people who I thought were kind of on the fence have decided to more aggressively come forward."

Bennett met us in a sold first-floor duplex condo listed for $1.5 million on which she said the seller doubled his money in just 10 years.

"I think I'm going to be very busy," she said.

But Bennett said she does not expect prices to double again. Instead, she forecast sale properties to move faster, bidding wars to become more common, the 15,000 rentals expected to nearly to double to fill up, and then for rents to gradually increase.

"Long-term, this kind of appreciates the value of the neighborhood as a whole," she said.

Bennett expects to see some of the greatest price bumps occur outside of Long Island City, in neighborhoods like Sunnyside, just a few subway stops away.

"I just hope it can support the amount of people who are going to be here in the very near future," Bennett said.