Flexible office space provider WeWork plans to keep about 300 company-owned locations worldwide and expects to emerge from bankruptcy protection by May 31.
The New York-based company said Tuesday in a statement it reached a “significant milestone” in settling on the fates of some 450 unspecified locations in a move that signals WeWork’s monthslong process of negotiating with landlords is nearing an end.
WeWork said it will renegotiate rents in the case of about half of its 300 sites, with the others not facing changes in terms because they are what a WeWork spokesperson described to CoStar News as strong performers. WeWork is also exiting another 150 locations either after it has rejected leases or has come to an agreement with landlords, the spokesperson said.
While the future of a further 50 locations remains undecided, the latest development signals that WeWork expects to emerge from bankruptcy with just about half the 610 wholly owned locations it had on June 30. It expects the decisions on all but about 10% of its locations to help save more than $8 billion, or 40%, in total future rent commitments. It has called its lease burden the biggest challenge to becoming profitable, saying in its last public quarterly earnings report that leasing costs take up about three-quarters of its revenue.
WeWork filed for bankruptcy after years of signing expensive leases at the cost of profit under former Chief Executive Adam Neumann, who co-founded the company in 2010. Neumann, through his new real estate company, Flow, and working with other partners, recently indicated they made an offer to buy WeWork for more than $500 million.
Declining to specify whether the expected rent reductions are enough to bring the money-losing company into the black, the spokesperson told CoStar News that WeWork is only going to keep buildings with lease terms that allow it to be financially successful, adding there will be more savings made as it settles on the remaining 10% of the locations.
Debt Reduction
WeWork’s debt holders owning 92% of its secured notes have agreed to eliminate over $3 billion in pre-petition secured debt obligations that will leave the company with little to no debt, the spokesperson said, a move that will help bolster the company's bottom line because it means WeWork will no longer have to make interest payments on that amount of debt. Those debt holders, including majority shareholder SoftBank, have agreed to exchange the debt for equity in the company after it emerges from bankruptcy, WeWork has said.
The spokesperson declined to give a breakdown of the 450 global locations by markets and how many are in the United States and Canada, where its bankruptcy case applies. So far, WeWork has only formally assumed in the bankruptcy court 25 locations out of about 300 in the two countries.
That included four new locations it disclosed in a court filing Saturday: 1175 Peachtree St. in Atlanta; 200 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, D.C.; 1 University Ave. in Toronto; and 110 Corcoran St. in Durham, North Carolina. WeWork has officially rejected 94 leases in the United States and Canada, including 250 E. 200 S in Salt Lake City, which was disclosed in a separate court filing Saturday.
“We are well on our way to building a strong and sustainable WeWork,” David Tolley, the company's chief executive, said in the statement. “The size, scope, and complexity of our real estate restructuring is unprecedented in our industry, and we’ve made remarkable progress to date optimizing our building footprint.”
WeWork expects to remain “a continuing leader” in its industry with over 20 million square feet of real estate in over 20 countries around the world, Tolley said.
WeWork’s owned locations span the United States, Canada and Europe, as well as countries such as Singapore and South Korea in Asia. The company left Oslo, Norway, as part of the restructuring process, the spokesperson told CoStar. Its lease renegotiations and restructurings exclude franchised or joint-venture markets such as India, Japan and China.
A panel representing WeWork's unsecured creditors had recently filed a motion seeking bankruptcy court approval to sue SoftBank and related parties to help recover hundreds of millions of dollars for landlords and its other unsecured creditors. The bankruptcy filing also led to payment disputes with partners such as brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. WeWork is a tenant in a Virginia building CoStar acquired earlier this year, making CoStar a creditor in the case.