WeWork has been shedding its massive portfolio of United Kingdom and Irish offices for several years, but that process has accelerated in recent weeks.
The shared office space provider has filed a petition for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States, and said that filing is limited to its home country. Even so, the shedding of space recently raises the question of what it still occupies in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
According to an analysis of its websites at the end of last week and CoStar's data, the New York-based coworking company still occupies millions of square feet across London, Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Cambridge and Dublin, though this may not reflect where it has quietly reduced space within a building.
The vast majority is in London, where it now occupies 36 buildings across 2.89 million square feet.
In Dublin it occupies or prelets 187,809 square feet in four buildings. In the United Kingdom regional markets it occupies 421,146 square feet in seven buildings, four in Manchester and one in each of Edinburgh, Birmingham and Cambridge.
No single landlord has multiple exposures, with M&G and Nuveen both landlords at two buildings. The largest single landlord exposure is Almacantar's 290,000-square-foot Southbank West in Waterloo.
The most exposed London submarket is City Core North, where WeWork occupies 684,000 square feet.
The company said the filing applies only to WeWork’s United States operation while Canada is set to make its own equivalent of a bankruptcy filing. Locations outside the United States and Canada and WeWork’s franchised locations are not part of the filing.
A WeWork spokesperson said that the United Kingdom and Ireland "is, and always will be, one of our most important markets, and we are fully committed to providing our members with world-class, flexible workspace solutions for the long term. We continue to work collaboratively with our landlord partners on solutions that set all parties up for sustainable success."
The spokesperson added the filing is aimed at addressing "our high cost and inflexible lease portfolio and position the company for success.”
This story was updated Nov. 7 to add a WeWork spokesperson comment in the last two paragraphs.