Breaking Property News – 30/04/24
Daily bite-sized proptech and property news in partnership with Proptech-X.
Will Yardi’s multi-million gamble on WeWork the former £37Bn Unicorn pay off?
The word is that Adam Neumann the enfante terrible and former co-founder is unlikely to be the new owner of WeWork as it emerges out of the gloom of its present bankrupt state. Yardi now looks well positioned to become a majority shareholder of the company with a new 60% stake, shored up by an injection of £269m together with capital injected by other parties.
If this restructuring is waived through in late May Softbank would look to hold over 15% of the equity of the phoenix company. But the bigger question I feel is – in a different time and place WeWork was a £37Bn Unicorn, at a time that many companies had hyper-inflated ticket prices.
In some ways Yardi is in so deep that following through with this deal is better than any alternative plan, but there is still a huge mess with regard to landlord liabilities and perhaps more crucially has the world spun on, and is work itself still morphing into a more liquid asset type?
Everyone has to work, but is the WeWork model going to in the next decade be the de facto operating model? I have my doubts, but by June 2024, many stakeholders are going to be pulling out all the stops to ensure it just might be.
Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward. PropTech-X
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