Archinect - News

Adam Neumann is attempting to buy his way back into WeWork

2024-02-06T20:00:00-05:00

Five years after driving WeWork into the ground, co-founder and ousted CEO Adam Neumann has now hatched a plan to buy it out of bankruptcy. In a letter to WeWork’s advisers obtained by The New York Times, Neumann and his new real estate business, Flow Global, express interest in buying the co-working space solution — but claim WeWork has been ignoring attempts to get more information so they can come up with a bid.

WeWork, meanwhile, is beginning to walk away from even more properties under the direction of new CEO David Tolley after announcing an initial list of 40 that would be relinquished in November.

Neumann had cited outside scrutiny as his main reason for leaving the company in September 2019. His attempts since December to purchase the company through his new housing startup Flow Global constitutes the second such push since Bay Area financier Dan Loeb funded the project in August 2022. The return-to-office downturn is being cited as their principal motivation. In a letter to WeWork advisers, Neumann's attorney said it would be a "value-maximizing transaction for all stakeholders."

WeWork currently owes about $18.6 billion in debts, according to their Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing from November.

WeWork seeks to vacate 40 New York properties following bankruptcy filing

2023-11-15T14:32:00-05:00

After officially filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week, WeWork has released a subsequent list of 40 “underperforming locations” across New York City that the company hopes to walk away from over the coming months pending court approvals.

The news was first made public via the Commercial Observer, which also reported WeWork as identifying another 29 properties in the U.S. and Canada it plans to relinquish. The news adds to concerns over the performance of the commercial real estate market in New York and other cities. WeWork had been, until very recently, one of the biggest tenants in Manhattan.

The company has retained Hilco Real Estate to re-negotiate terms on its more than 400 outstanding leases and will allow some members to re-negotiate with landlords directly in certain cases. Current members will be transferred to better-performing locations still operated by WeWork. (The company has a total of 779 properties worldwide.)

Related on Archinect: WeWork is cutting ...

WeWork is mulling a potential Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, according to reports

2023-11-01T16:03:00-04:00

WeWork's tumultuous thirteen-year saga may be coming to an end soon, as now Reuters and the Wall Street Journal have reported on the company’s apparently imminent plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in New Jersey.

The news was first reported by the WSJ early Tuesday, precipitating a dramatic nearly 50% drop in WeWork’s stock evaluation. A spokesperson for the company told reporters from CNN the same day that they would not comment on the legal maneuver, calling the news “speculation.”

Shares of WeWork have fallen by 96% since the beginning of the year. The business model founder Adam Neumann developed into a record-breaking $47 billion initial valuation was ultimately felled by the post-pandemic rise in remote work and other factors, including multiple conflicts of interest that led to his resignation in September 2019.

Neumann has since pivoted to a new housing startup venture called Flow last summer following a $350 million outside investment and is yet to provide his own stat...

WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann is getting into the housing market with a new startup

2022-08-16T18:49:00-04:00

WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann is once again making waves with the announcement of a new startup called Flow that’s being funded by early Airbnb investors Andreessen Horowitz and is promoting itself as a real estate startup that aims to revolutionize the residential housing industry.

The $350 million deal is said to be the largest in the Silicon Valley fund’s 13-year history and brings Flow’s initial evaluation to exactly $1 billion, a pittance when compared to the $47 billion figure WeWork received in 2019 thanks to SoftBank. The company’s operation will officially begin next year, according to the New York Times’ DealBook page, which first reported the news late Monday.

“We love seeing repeat-founders build on past successes by growing from lessons learned," Marc Andreessen stated, referring to Neumann's well-documented past. “The successes and lessons are plenty.”

Neumann has repo...

Bjarke Ingels Joins WeWork as Chief Architect, to Start Developing Neighborhood-Scale "Campuses"

2018-05-08T11:12:00-04:00

Neumann says that in 2018, that will mean WeWork will build more buildings, some that reimagine what’s already there, like the Lord & Taylor project, and others that WeWork and Ingels will design in their entirety. Then, in 2019, the company plans to start creating “campuses”–essentially, WeWork on a neighborhood scale. That could look like a several-block radius where there’s a coworking space, coliving residence, and a school all clustered together, all operating under the WeWork umbrella.

BIG has shared with Archinect the following press release:

WeWork announces Bjarke Ingels as Chief Architect to advise and develop the firm’s design vision and language for buildings, campuses and neighborhoods globally. Bjarke will maintain his role as Founding Partner and Creative Director at the New York, London and Copenhagen-based architecture firm, BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group.

“WeWork was founded at the exact same time as when I had arrived to New York. In that short amount of time – the blink of an eye at the time scale of architecture – they have accomplished incredible things and they are committed to continuing their trajectory to places we can only imagine. WeWork’s commitment to community and culturally-driven development is perfectly aligned with our active, social and environmental agendas. As WeWork takes on larger and more holistic urban and architectural challenges, I am very excited to contribute with my insights and ideas to extend their community-oriented vision to ...

Can WeWork re-engineer the spatial dynamics of society?

2016-03-17T12:57:00-04:00

WeWork’s inspirational mottoes—"Do what you love," "Thank God it’s Monday," among many others—its evangelical faithful, and gatherings like the summit all have religious echoes..."Start imagining it a bit bigger," Neumann says about WeLive, stoking his idyllic view, "an entire building. And then instead of having just one building doing it, five buildings doing it. Then you’ll be able to imagine what a WeNeighborhood or a WeStreet would be."

This in-depth profile of WeWork founder and (pro-capitalist) visionary Adam Neumann is worth the read. Whether you like to freestyle your work and life or prefer the centuries-old model of deeded quiet, WeWork (and now, WeLive) is making a previously unsustainable model profitable. Is Neumann just creating a fashionable new real estate bubble, or is he reengineering the way society operates?

To catch you up: