It’s official: WeWork now rents more office space than anyone in Manhattan—including their previous competitor, JP Morgan. With 5.3 million square feet of rented space, the coworking company clearly intends to maintain its momentum, thus lending credit to the inherent value of social work environments.
The sheer growth WeWork has seen in 2018 speaks to the notion that the coworking craze — perhaps surprisingly — isn’t slowing down.
While WeWork (and other similarly themed companies) only accounted for 3.3 percent of the new leases signed in 2017, they ate up 9.7 percent of new leases signed in the first two-thirds of 2018. Those aren’t the numbers of a trend in decline.
Despite some water cooler disdain toward WeWork’s potentially wishy-washy work culture and some of their latest publicity stunts, investors seem to like them more than ever. In fact, word on the street is that SoftBank — a prolific WeWork investor — is considering a second investment that would value WeWork at or around 40 billion dollars.
Like we said: not a sign of a declining company.
WeWork’s objective success isn’t the star of the show here, however; it’s what they’ve proven through that success which matters.
WeWork’s ethos (that human beings need interaction with other similar human beings in order to thrive in a workplace) gets further reinforced with every lease the company signs.
If small- to mid-sized companies can take away one thing from WeWork’s example, it’s this – many people need other people in order to do their best work.
There will always be exceptions to the rule—plenty of folks work alone from home and are happy to do so—but the fact that freelancers living in some of the most expensive real estate in this country are willing to pay additional cash just to be around other like-minded individuals is fairly indicative.
If nothing else, keep in mind the social atmosphere afforded by WeWork when designing your office spaces or nailing down your workplace culture expectations. And yes, they allow Realtors and brokers to lease space, too…
Jack Lloyd has a BA in Creative Writing from Forest Grove's Pacific University; he spends his writing days using his degree to pursue semicolons, freelance writing and editing, oxford commas, and enough coffee to kill a bear. His infatuation with rain is matched only by his dry sense of humor.
