They seem to try to use this metric to claim healthy financials on individual locations (because they rent out desks in aggregate for more than the office lease costs) but it ignores where a large part of their costs are (central overhead) and thus it’s an unrealistic picture of how they actually run the business.

If they ran themselves like a real estate company then their central function would probably be a few attorneys to process deals and some people handling paperwork. Instead they have huge central costs which they want people to ignore via these metrics.

Simple non-GAAP is one thing but most of these invented metrics scream “our financials are terrible so we made up this metric where if you ignore our real costs we look less terrible”