One Year Postbankruptcy, WeWork Is Profitable, Mature And Growing Again

WeWork emerged from its nine-month Chapter 11 restructuring one year ago as a private company free of debt. To get there, it had to undergo a massive purge — of both its real estate and its reputation. 

In making itself synonymous with coworking, the company had become bloated. At its 2019 peak, less than a decade after its founding, WeWork operated 850 locations.

Its rapid growth was fueled by a SoftBank investment that valued the company at $47B and a controversial CEO. When the pandemic hit, it was loaded with unprofitable, undesirable locations and the billions of dollars of rent payments and maintenance costs tied to them.

WeWork filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 6, 2023. It reported $19B in liabilities and $15B in assets and more than 500 locations, nearly 300 in the U.S. and Canada. It spent almost a year negotiating with its investors, lenders, landlords and vendors, needing to find a way to tear up more than 100 of its leases and wipe away over $4B of debt. By June 11, 2024, it had done just that.

Today, WeWork has positioned itself as a more mature company led by a team of real estate veterans, a new model and an ability to roll with the punches in an ever-evolving office market. At its helm as CEO is longtime Cushman & Wakefield executive John Santora, and behind the scenes is a new majority owner, real estate tech giant Yardi Systems.

“We were burdened for many years with our portfolio that everybody knew about and saw,” WeWork Regional President for North America Luke Robinson, who has been with the firm for over a decade, told Bisnow. 

It has started adding locations again after spending four years shaving down its portfolio. And after years of racking up billions in losses, the company has had positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for six months in a row now, Robinson said. 

“We could not have said that any time in our past,” he said.

Today, the company has approximately 170 locations in the U.S. and Canada. The bankruptcy negotiations have saved the business from an estimated $12B in rent obligations.

Additionally, it’s freed up funds that WeWork can use to spruce up its locations. It plans to spend between $80M and $100M this year to upgrade properties across its global portfolio. It has also entered into a partnership with the Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center to improve its hospitality training.

“[We were] handcuffed a bit on what we were able to do with regards to investing back into our spaces,” Robinson said. “We are able to really strategically think about growth again. We were definitely not thinking about growth prior to the restructuring.”

Since passing its financial obstacles, WeWork has had to clear some emotional hurdles. The business revolves around both its members and its landlords. Its success requires the buy-in of both sides. That’s, in part, where Santora and his leadership team come in.

“When you have a firm where the pendulum has swung back and forth many times, when someone can provide trust and stability, that is a very precious commodity,” Cushman & Wakefield Chairman of Global Brokerage Bruce Mosler said. 

Mosler worked closely with Santora during his time at Cushman & Wakefield and now works with WeWork on its postbankruptcy deals.

“When I'm representing them and I'm talking to a landlord, I say three things,” Mosler said. “First, obviously you know them. Second, this is WeWork 2.0. Third, John Santora is worth betting on.”

For the majority of its history, WeWork has been haunted by tales of its kooky co-founder, Adam Neumann, and its reputation for hosting expensive music festivals and equipping its offices with on-tap alcohol. Though those practices ended years before the bankruptcy, Santora is leaning on his 47-year-long history in the corporate real estate world to bury any remnants of the fast and loose Neumann days.

“I am born in real estate,” Santora said on a podcast episode of The Weekly Take from CBRE. “There’s a discipline and a structure that comes from me, that comes from our new real estate team, that comes from our new ownership structure.”

Santora has ushered in a new era — one where leadership publicly acknowledges WeWork as a real estate company, not a tech firm. The new regime has brought back some of the more buttoned-up members, such as financial institutions, as well as helped retain landlord partnerships, he said.

“There's trust in WeWork,” Santora said on the podcast. “There's trust in my management team. And there's trust in our finances.” 

The company was already trying to right the ship in the years before going bankrupt. It laid off more than 2,400 workers after its botched attempt at going public in 2019 and was whittling its portfolio around the country. That often left it open to lawsuits from the owners of buildings they left.

But the efforts ultimately weren't enough. After executives said there was “substantial doubt” about its ability to remain solvent, WeWork told landlords it hoped to renegotiate “nearly all” of its leases. When the bankruptcy finally happened, landlords said they were far from surprised.

“They had been fairly transparent,” Steinhauer Properties President Greg Steinhauer said. “It's not like it hadn't been in the news.”

But it’s the company’s communication during the restructuring process that has been crucial, property owners said. Steinhauer and Beacon Capital Partners President and CEO Fred Seigel both recall meeting with WeWork executives in New York. 

Beacon was among WeWork’s largest creditors. Bankruptcy filings showed it was owed $3.5M in unpaid rent and lease termination fees.

“They would tell you what they knew and they would tell you ‘We don't know where this might be heading,’” Seigel said. 

Seigel said that most of the conversations were about lease restructurings, though WeWork did exit one lease in the time leading up to the bankruptcy. 

“We collected on the guarantee and it didn't affect the relationship at all,” Seigel said.

WeWork is still a tenant in seven of Beacon's properties. 

But while WeWork was refining its portfolio, the coworking field was growing increasingly crowded, driven by a shift toward flexible work and a surge in available offices, trends that have yet to slow.

During the first three months of 2025, the five top coworking brands — Regus, HQ, Industrious, Spaces and WeWork — increased their national footprint by 6%, collectively operating over 1,800 locations, according to a report by Coworking Cafe. 

As of April, there were a total of 7,840 flex workspaces across the country, up from nearly 6,600 a year earlier. Demand for the spaces grew as more companies adopted hybrid work models.

But now, more and more employees are being summoned back to their traditional desks. On the heels of a healthy 2024, office leasing activity jumped 18% year-over-year in the first quarter, according to a national report by CBRE.

WeWork managed to navigate through the stormy waters of bankruptcy, but the industry's winds have shifted. The firm is focusing on new solutions as a result. 

Steinhauer’s Hawk Tower was among one of the leases that WeWork switched to a management agreement. The model is not new to the flexible office space industry but has only recently become common for WeWork. 

Under the structure, WeWork shares profits with the building’s property owner rather than leasing the space directly.

WeWork has also doubled down on its enterprise model. Under the arrangement, it leases and operates the space on behalf of a single tenant. 

The company largely retained its enterprise book of business through the bankruptcy and is continuing to grow it, Robinson said. It signed leases for nearly 1M SF of office space it manages for Amazon in New York City, Silicon Valley, Dallas and Nashville in addition to deals the e-commerce behemoth has inked with landlords directly.

Christelle Rohaut, CEO of office management firm Codi, said more landlords and tenants will seek out coworking operators to take over the management of parts of their portfolio.

Since the pandemic, leasing has been primarily concentrated in amenity-rich, well-located offices. The vacancy rate for prime office buildings was just under 15% in the first quarter compared to approximately 19% for non-prime buildings, according to CBRE. 

Landlords of Class-B and C properties have to find ways to attract tenants, whether that be with furniture or food, Rohaut said.

“Most landlords can't do that, and it's not their expertise,” Rohaut said. “They will have to find solutions and partners.”

WeWork has ceded ground in the space to Industrious, which has surpassed it in number of U.S. locations, according to Coworking Cafe, a Yardi-owned brand. 

CBRE acquired Industrious in January at an $800M valuation, merging it with its property management group. Newmark bought Knotel out of bankruptcy in 2021 to expand its management and consulting services. Yardi may be seeking to do the same with WeWork, Rohaut theorized.

At least for now, the companies remain separate. For WeWork, Robinson said that Yardi has “really enhanced the tech side” of the business by providing utilization data. That technology, alongside the company’s new leadership, assists the firm in making better leasing decisions and moving past the decisions it made as a startup.

“In the past, when we were in just rapid expansion mode, we were not as prescriptive on the exact space we took,” Robinson said. “We’re back to being able to make those split decisions and make them quickly, but with 15 years of experience and what works and what doesn’t work.”