WeWork Wants You to Know It's a Grown-Up Real-Estate Firm Now

Wall Street Journal

3 days ago

A new video for the workspace company WeWork delivers shot after shot of city skylines, gleaming glass buildings and meeting rooms filled with besuited, efficient-looking workers.
'WeWork is the platform that maximizes the efficiency of your real-estate strategy,' a voice-over says. There isn't a beer tap in sight.
In short, it looks like an ad designed to advertise an office-rental firm. And that's the point, according to WeWork's new chief marketing and communications officer, Petula Lucey, who spearheaded the video as part of a new international advertising campaign called 'WeWork for Business.'
'This campaign creates a new visual and linguistic approach that is sophisticated and mature and reflects a company that's grown up,' she said. The push will include TV commercials, posters, social media and other digital ads.
The buttoned-up nature of 'WeWork for Business' is a far cry from the image WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann once presented.
WeWork made its name as a startup that leased office space, renovated it with quirky decor and hip perks like free kombucha, and subleased the spaces on a flexible, short-term basis to companies and individuals looking to co-work among others.
Neumann pitched the company to investors as a tech platform with the potential to expand into housing, schooling, fitness and more, all the while gaining a reputation for a you-only-live-once approach to spending, partying and corporate culture.
The company gained a $47 billion valuation in 2019, only to shock investors by disclosing huge losses in its prospectus for an initial public offering. It put the IPO on pause and Neumann stepped down, but pandemic lockdowns dealt a fresh blow. WeWork went public in 2021 and filed for bankruptcy in 2023.
A New Jersey court last year approved a plan to restructure WeWork as a smaller, private business under the control of real-estate software firm Yardi Systems, which installed as chief executive John Santora, a veteran executive of real-estate giant Cushman & Wakefield. He hired Lucey, who had worked as Cushman's head of marketing and communications between 2015 and 2017, last November.
'When you talk about a role of a lifetime, this for me, was it,' Lucey said. 'There was this opportunity to help reshape this iconic brand that was suffering from eroding trust. Public opinion had plummeted and there was this ever-continuous negative news cycle.'
Lucey held off from running any major advertising until her team could tell a business story that would reassure any renters jittery about leasing from the inspiration for a TV show called 'WeCrashed.'
Much of her work until now has involved publicizing the facts and figures. The company says it emerged from bankruptcy debt-free, shrunk its portfolio to around 600 locations from its peak of 850, generated $2.2 billion in revenue in 2024 and claims 47 members of the Fortune 100 as tenants. WeWork plans to invest between $80 million and $100 million into its spaces in 2025, Lucey said.
WeWork also said the latest three quarters delivered the company's first quarterly profits on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.
The global market for providing flexible offices, in which renters sometimes share space and can expand or shrink their square footage as their needs change, is expected to grow from $39.6 billion in 2024 to $136.5 billion by 2032, aided by a shift toward hybrid work models and co-working spaces, according to market researcher Fortune Business Insights.
But WeWork is no longer essentially alone in the category it made famous, with competitors like Industrious, LiquidSpace and IWG's Regus and Spaces gaining ground. And its locations look less like the funky work-to-party spaces of before, largely dispensing with the kitschy neon signs and beer kegs.
Without buzzy vibes to lure in new tenants, WeWork plans to drive home its years of experience, still-sizable global footprint and ability to serve businesses of different sizes, Lucey said.
Having Santora at the helm helps the image makeover. In contrast to the private jet-setting Neumann, the 68-year-old has lived on Staten Island, N.Y., his entire life and spent 47 years at Cushman. In interviews he jokes about the pain of swapping his work suits for more casual office-wear. With no designs on selling himself as a technology guy, he presents himself as a safe pair of hands in the world of real estate.
Lucey was born and raised in Manhattan, where she still lives. She joined Merrill Lynch in 2002 as an in-house marketer and went on to work for real-estate companies including Tishman Speyer and real-estate software company HqO.
'Growing up in professional services organizations, you have to have a really thick skin,' she said.
Lucey witnessed real-estate companies' shift from selling space to selling the tenant experience in order to win bigger, longer term contracts and cushion themselves from dips. WeWork for all its flaws had nailed that proposition, she said. And the brand, for better or worse, still holds high awareness; the new leadership never discussed changing the name, Lucey said.
WeWork in 2018 spent a total of $379 million on sales and marketing, including $91.2 million for advertising, according to the documents from WeWork's first IPO attempt. Lucey's budget is smaller, although the brand is spending more than $1 million on the new campaign.
'Everything the company is doing is based on smart discipline, including how we staff and how we spend our money,' Lucey said.
Write to Katie Deighton at [e-mail]