WeWork is locked in a legal battle with a landlord that is looking to evict the global flexible-space provider from its largest and most profitable location in London, which is also among its largest offices in the world.

Developer Almacantar filed in High Court to take back about 290,000 square feet occupied by New York-based WeWork at 10 York Road under a lease with 15 years remaining. Almacantar said the lease is subject to forfeiture based on factors including financial conditions stated in WeWork’s U.S. Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. WeWork said it will “vigorously defend ourselves in court,” and business remains uninterrupted at the London office listed in the court filing.

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Higher room rates are expected to help offset rising operating costs and forestall any distress that would lead European hotel owners to sell their properties at discounts, according to financing professionals at the Atlantic Ocean Hotel Investors Summit in Madrid.

Panelists said a constrained hotel transaction market in 2023 frustrated many, but even a lack of distress does not mean hotels won’t trade this year as investment gradually recovers. Investors have built up large reserves of capital, and new equity is entering the market to help reposition hotels’ capital structures, a trend that is likely to persist over the next five years.

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French commercial property investment is expected to stabilize in 2024 and 2025, with inflation gradually easing but remaining high enough to create market turbulence in the short term, according to experts at an outlook conference hosted by investor association IEIF. There is cautious optimism about improving conditions overall for French and European investment.

“The first thing that is clear is that the period of monetary unorthodoxy observed over the last 15 years is over,” said IEIF Chairman Xavier Lépine. IEIF Senior Advisor Pierre Schoffler said interest rates have returned to levels that prevailed prior to the global financial crisis of 2008.

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A property investment subsidiary of insurance firm Swiss Life is selling five new logistics properties in Germany to LaSalle Investment Management of Chicago for about €315 million, CoStar publication Thomas Daily has learned from informed sources.

This would be the second-largest logistics deal in Germany in the past 12 months. The five properties total about 235,000 square meters and were completed by developer Beos, a Swiss Life subsidiary, in 2022 and 2023. They are located in Wülfrath, Duisburg, Voerde, Koblenz and Zwickau.

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Amazon MGM Studios, the e-commerce giant’s media production division, agreed to a lease for studio space in Toronto that would mark its first multiyear commitment in Canada and only the second such deal outside the United States.

The studio arm, which films productions in Canada such as “The Boys” and “Gen V,” said it signed a contract with Pinewood Toronto Studios to use new production facilities at its downtown Toronto studio complex, with financial details not disclosed. Named after the famed Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom, the 11-soundstage complex occupies 20 acres just west of the downtown core and is the largest of its kind in Canada.

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Social media giant TikTok is defying the tech industry’s broader real estate retrenchment as the company proceeds with plans to significantly expand its office space across the United States.

The tech firm, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, is collectively looking to lease hundreds of thousands of square feet in Silicon Valley, the greater Seattle area, and Nashville, Tennessee, according to property records, people familiar with the potential deals, and CoStar data. In some cases, TikTok is even set to refill space left behind by a fellow tech company, underscoring the firm’s anomalous views on physical office space as many of its counterparts shrink their own portfolios.

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This report was compiled from CoStar’s news publications in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France and Germany.