WeWork will soon occupy the most square footage of private office space in Manhattan, the New York City-based co-working giant announced this week.
Though shared work-space accounts for less than 3% of office space in Manhattan, according to a Cushman & Wakefield report, WeWork is achieving a milestone, surpassing the big banks that typically dominate the borough’s commercial real estate.
The company was co-founded in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey, who started with one floor in 154 Grant St. in SoHo.
Their goal was to give freelancers and startups space to work in a professional setting without needing to sign long-term leases for private offices.
WeWork now has 50 locations in Manhattan, including 85 Broad St. in the Financial District, 750 Lexington Ave. in Midtown East and 8 W. 126th St. in Harlem, that are used by 50,000 members.
Thanks to a recent deal for 258,344 square feet of office space at 21 Penn Plaza, it will soon fill more than 5.3 million square feet throughout the borough. This will surpass the 5.2 million square feet owned and rented by JPMorgan Chase.
They have several shared work-space competitors in Manhattan, such as Alley and The Farm. Knotel, meanwhile, this week signed four new leases totaling nearly 32,000 square feet in the borough.
But WeWork has outpaced them, growing into a global enterprise.
The company has more than 300 sites in 23 countries around the world, including in other U.S. cities like Raleigh and San Francisco, with everyone from independent contractors to Fortune 500 companies among its members.
In New York City, where 63% of companies are small businesses, according to an HR&A Advisors survey, 18,000 of which are WeWork members, “the last three buildings that we opened [had] close to 100% occupancy, so the demand is really driving the growth,” Gjonbalaj said.
WeWork is expanding in areas beyond office space square footage, he added.
The company aims to be a technology pioneer, with projects like proprietary software to manage its real estate leases and innovative data collection on foot traffic to better serve its members needs.
“We try to understand how many people use a conference room and what days or what times is the conference room utilized; how do people enter our lobbies, do they go to the center of gravity or the coffee station?” Gjonbalaj explained.
He noted that last year, WeWork bought Fieldlens, a tech firm that streamlines communication in the construction industry.
“In everything we do, we think about technology,” Gjonbalaj said.
In 2016, WeWork launched WeLive, shared living spaces in Washington, D.C. and Manhattan that are equipped with furniture, cable, Wi-Fi, bath towels and silverware.
Audra Lambert, a Manhattan-based marketing manager and content creator, has worked for a client out of WeWork NoMad, at 79 Madison Ave., for three months.
Some favorite aspects of it are, “free beer and fruit infused water, [and] flexible working space across multiple floors,” she said.
She added that SoHo House, a hotel at 29-35 Ninth Ave. in the Meatpacking District, is another popular spot to use for offices downtown, but, “WeWork is a good entry level co-working space: attainable and affordable.”
