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Re:WeWork is set to become the No. 1 tenant of London office... by dalbasal on Thursday December 28, 2017 @07:22AM (#16021647)
I'm not sure to what extent this is really startup luxury good.

First, here (tel aviv) the basic wework costs range from $150 to $600 depending on location and frills (eg private office). This sounds like pretty standard pp office costs. They tend to be well liked by the people who work there. Well kept, well located, social, etc. Unless paying money for office workspace is ipso facto a luxury good, this seems like a regular good. Money for services at market rates.

Second, people working there range. There are some are "startups" without definitional grey areas but these're just some of the tenants. There are external employees of regular companies. All the work from home people that prefer a shared office, at least part of the time. Apartments and cafes are still active, but it turned out there's room in the market.

The way I see this is (1) internet has created more demand for flexible offices. (2) The older versions of this were pretty crappy, so these guys moved in.

As to wework as an investment... IDK. But, you could say that about a lot of companies. As a company offering a product to a market for a price, seems like a fine company. The product is sensible. People like it. It will vary geographically, but seems perfectly plausible that wework-like offices will grow to house 1m workers.

Re:WeWork is set to become the No. 1 tenant of London office... by mtanski on Thursday December 28, 2017 @10:45AM (#16022590)
Their business model is not complicated. They arbitrage office space. Office space is expensive to rent (operationally), takes a long time to find a tenant, and there's a lot of different kinds of leases (short/long term) and most office management companies are not equipped to deal with 100s of tenants in a single space. Similarly there's lots of pain points when you're the trnter, in terms of finding the space which can be time consuming, deposits, contract negotiations, needing to setup utilities (esp internet).

Wework opertionalizes all of things putting them in position of being able to arbitrage this disconnect in the market.

Re:WeWork is set to become the No. 1 tenant of London office... by dalbasal on Thursday December 28, 2017 @11:28AM (#16022991)
I think that's stretching the definition of arbitrage. It's arbitrage in the sense that a hotel is.
Re:WeWork is set to become the No. 1 tenant of London office... by mtanski on Sunday December 31, 2017 @07:10PM (#16043801)
How's that? Weworks is buying in one market and reselling (with value adds) in a different market and profiting off this difference.

They lease large commercial (multi-story) offices from owners and building management companies and rent out to 100s of small businesses in the same space.