WeWork adopting franchise model

A franchise model would turn WeWork from a tenant taking real estate risk into an operator selling a playbook. Instead of signing a 10 to 15 year lease, funding the buildout, and hoping desks fill up fast enough, WeWork can let a landlord own the space and pay WeWork for design, software, staffing, sales, and day to day operations. That shifts the economics toward fees and away from lease liabilities.

• The raw ingredients were already there. Powered by We packaged office design, operations, and community management for landlords and enterprises, and the franchise business was already generating management fee revenue by 2020, even if it was still small at $5M.
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• There is a clear precedent in flex space. IWG actively markets a franchise program that gives partners its brands, CRM, training, and sales platform. Industrious scaled through management agreements with landlords, and CBRE bought the rest of the company in January 2025, then grouped it with property and facilities management.
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• For landlords, this structure is easier to swallow than classic coworking arbitrage. They keep ownership of the building economics, while WeWork handles the practical work of laying out the floor, pricing desks and offices, running bookings, staffing the front desk, and keeping occupancy up through its brand and member network.
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The next phase of flex space looks more like hotel management than startup era coworking. If WeWork keeps expanding partner locations and management services, its strongest asset will be operating know how and distribution, not its balance sheet, and that makes growth more durable across real estate cycles.