What’s WeWork’s “product” again? Exposed brick and free beer? Seems like the only roadblock to successful emulation here is money and property — both of which CBRE has. You can hire someone for the interior design. They already split off a new brand with a fun, easy name.

WeWork's product is handling landlord and broker negotiations for you. They are giving more power to the tenant as WeWork is large enough that they often carry significantly more leverage into a negotiation.

Office building landlord negotiations are rarely problematic. The issues come from (a) new landlords who don't know what they're doing; (b) new tenants who don't know what they're doing; (c) trying to actually find space that works.

WeWork doesn't give more power to the tenant. WeWork is going to be less flexible on terms for the tenants, because they're doing smaller, shorter-term deals. No space improvement, no reconfiguration, no nothing -- you want the space or not?

WeWork has leverage that they convert into a lot of arbitrage. I'm not so convinced of the value there.

Businesses love to throw money at a problem so it Just Works and they don’t have to think about it. This shouldn’t be surprising: a large percentage of the enterprise software industry, including most cloud computing, runs on this tendency. WeWork is just extending this idea into the realm of physical office space.

It’s my understanding that the Hana offering is run entirely by CBRE, much in the way CBRE will manage buildings as a service. I would assume it’s an offering for the owner/landlord where they (landlord/owner) would be hands off and there would be a split with CBRE.

https://www.cbre.com/real-estate-services/directory/flexible...

Disclosure: I work for CBRE, but in a different line of business with no knowledge of Hana outside of what is explained by the above link.

It is straightforward to provide consistency with a franchise model, as many large well known brands demonstrate every day (Subway, Dunkin', Anytime Fitness [which is basically WeWork as a gym], any number of hotel brands, etc). If you don't meet the brand standards, you get the boot and lose your investment.