Burger King's strategy for the longest time used to be 'just build across the street from McDonald's'

Sounds smart, let maccers do the research.

From what I heard they were doing some notable data engineering - leveraging 4square data to decide where to put locations based on optimisation algorithms, profiling potential lessees based on known good ones, optimizing workspace layout based on camera and keyfob data, lease price elasticity tests... Lots of interesting domains. Sadly I'm sure this was/is one of the first departments to get downsided post backdown.

Data science is one of the few areas where WeWork may achieve an economy of scale - your local coworking operator won't be able to have that in house, and their ops system SaaS provider probably doesn't have the margins to invest heavily in it. If they're this messy at it though, that's not a good sign...

Except the local operator will have a more intimate understanding of area dynamics than data science can provide.

Precisely - Real estate boils down to financial operations on assets that have a number of factors and signals that go into predicting market prices. This also includes demand for commercial space.

There's been a meme for decades that McDonalds is really a real estate company that sells burgers on the side.

Ray Kroc actually said this. It's not just a meme; it's canon.