WeWork has finally made it to the stock market. With a nifty reverse move into a SPAC called BowX, the great daddy of the co-working industry will soon be coming to an exchange near you. Not, this time, at a valuation of $47bn - its valuation just prior to its spectacular unforced implosion in late 2019 - but at a much more sober $9bn, based on $3bn of actual revenue.
That more modest valuation is more digestible to hardened veterans of the real estate industry, who could never swallow WeWork's own vision of itself as a company destined to "elevate the world's consciousness" - and to do that BEFORE Harry and Meghan felt themselves uniquely called to that sacred vocation.
Less than two years later, it is easy to forget how much WeWork was a genuine disruptor in the world of office real estate. Although not the first coworking company, it became the brashest and the most ambitious, setting the standard for outrageous corporate hubris in its seemingly unstoppable path to global domination.
Within a few years of its founding, its cult-like leader Adam Neumann had the world’s leading venture capital companies lining up to throw money into his company. (Quickly forgotten were Neumann’s previous entrepreneurial experiences, running a company that made collapsible heels for women's shoes, and another which made cute baby clothes with protective knee pads, both of which failed miserably.)
But it was his 20-minute meeting in the back of a car with the legendary Masayoshi Son of Softbank which opened the floodgates to the billions of investment which came pouring in, kicked off by a $4.5bn starter cheque by Son himself. Cue the transformation into the pre-IPO We Company, whose formal prospectus for its pending mega-listing was dedicated to ..."The energy of WE".
Astonishingly, even a cursory reading of the prospectus showed the world that WE, in this instance, really meant the mystical maestro himself, Adam Neumann. When investors read about the proposed sale of his own shares pre-IPO, the sweetheart deals to enrich his wife and close buddies as co-founders, the leasing of his own buildings to the company and the massive royalty payments from the company to himself for the right to use the name WE, investors and the public could no longer keep their disbelief in suspension, and their cynicism was finally exhausted. The scales fell from their eyes, and daylight shone in on the massive con that the We Company had become.
In the most spectacular collapse in business history, the company went into meltdown and within weeks was on the brink of a massive insolvency.
It's just over a year since the company brought in Sandeep Mathrani, a professional real estate operator to run the company and salvage something from the unholy mess that it had created around the world. The situation looked hopeless.
But, lo! Within weeks the world was faced with far greater uncertainty and outright distress brought on by the COVID pandemic, and everything changed.
Here at REFIRE we follow closely the work of Dror Poleg, one of the foremost thinkers on the impact of technology on how people live and work. His book "Rethinking Real Estate" is required reading for anybody trying to figure out what world it is that all these new proptech companies are trying to grab a piece of.
He’s been writing about the office of the future for years, about Working from Home and about networks of spaces and services, helping individuals to do their best work, and it’s all coming true. With the arrival of COVID and Zoom, what was unthinkable a year ago is now reality for millions. The disruption was under way. Now it’s really here.
Poleg describes how Mathrani is earthing the company, now re-named WeWork, re-negotiating leases around the world and cancelling anything not riveted down in a contract. His own sizeable layoffs co-incided with the worldwide wave of similar layoffs, and he's concentrated on deals with large corporates, themselves shaken to the core about their lease commitments. The company's shareholders have stuck with him, including Masayoshi Son, who now owns about half the company. If the company recovers, he might get a chunk of his money back. But there’s a long way to go before that happens.
There are several signs that WeWork will still be the gorilla in its space as recovery picks up. It still loses a lot of money, but there are potential gems in its arsenal that may prove to be lucrative. One such is its WeWork All Access (WAA), a monthly subscription deal that allows users to access hundreds of shared locations.
It's developing other lines too, a collection of value-added services based around subscriptions and often in partnership with others, which employers might well pay on behalf of employees, if - as seems certain - they cannot entice more than a percentage of them ever to come back into the office. It's experimenting with a range of other services to help partly-distressed landlords rent out otherwise non-productive space. It sounds promising - and probably very much what WeWork should have been doing in the first place.
The company still has millions of square metres of office inventory worldwide, and huge market power. It's valued at 20% of what it was eighteen months ago, and for new investors, the past is another place. It’s about the future, and co-working is a big part of that. COVID might prove to be the event that saved WeWork's very sorry ass. It's still too early to tell - but if we were fancying a punt, that SPAC might be worth a look.
