WeWork's Extreme Growth Model Is Worrying European Bankers
Many are becoming reluctant to provide more money to fund its runaway growth.
WeWork has grown so large that its global shared-workspace footprint is roughly equal to all the office space in downtown Philadelphia.
Photographer: Ruhani Kaur/Bloomberg
The owner of a London office building negotiated a lease with a company that wanted all eight floors. To his surprise, his bankers at ING Groep NV shot it down.
ING balked because a single tenant, WeWork Cos., would be responsible for paying all the rent. And the Dutch bank isn’t alone. Increasingly, lenders in Europe are cooling toward the co-working giant, which started with six floors in a tenement-style building in New York’s SoHo district nine years ago, and now has 45 million square feet (4.2 million square meters) of office space around the world. For context, that’s nearly equal to all the office space in downtown Philadelphia.