Cushman & Wakefield is in talks to invest $150M in the special-purpose acquisition company that is planning to take coworking company WeWork public, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
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The investment will result in a partnership of some kind between the real estate services giant and WeWork, though the details aren't settled yet, Cushman & Wakefield Chief Investment Officer Nathaniel Robinson told the WSJ.
Other major brokerages are forming alliances with WeWork competitors. Early this year, Newmark Group struck a deal to buy the bankrupt Knotel Group, while CBRE acquired a 35% stake in coworking company Industrious.
Neither Cushman & Wakefield nor WeWork responded to queries from Bisnow on Monday about the matter.
In March, WeWork entered into a merger agreement with SPAC BowX Acquisition Corp. that valued the coworking giant at about $9B. The deal, which is expected to close later this year, will provide about $1.3B in cash to WeWork for further expansion, marking the next step in its turnaround from the collapse of its initial public offering in late 2019.
Currently, WeWork operates 700 locations in 153 cities. Workers had been returning to coworking space as the coronavirus pandemic appeared to ease in the spring, with WeWork reporting its strongest two months for sales since before the pandemic in April and May.
Altogether, WeWork said that gross desk sales reached 33,000 in April and 39,000 in May, or the equivalent of about 4.3M SF.
The emergence of the coronavirus's delta variant and rising rates of Covid-19 infections have made the immediate future less clear for the return to office space, however, as major employers have pushed back return-to-office plans.
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