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Comment by nugget | Hacker News Reader

Is it true that WeWork is now the largest single lessee of commercial real estate in the US? Seems like a bad bankruptcy could have some broad ripple effects.

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Hmm. Despite that there still a very small percent of all office space. I see 26 locations in NYC, I’m sure I’m missing a few so say 30.

Even if all those offices were the whole building (I think many (most) are just a subset of the floors that’s not much for the entire city.

Although it’d be interesting for all the people working in them, I wonder how that’d work out.

If wework folds, owners of the buildings might just market leases to the existing tenants

I should create a business to facilitate the transition from WeWork to leases, for the landlords. In 2 months I’ll be an intermediary worth... about 2bn.

I’m joking, I’m sure the CEO already has a reversion clause in the lease contracts, that leases should fall in the hands of his 3rd company in case of WeWork bankruptcy.

Well people are actually using the offices so prices will go down if they backrupt but they'll catch up. It would feel like an adjustment and not a bubble bursting.

It's anecdotal but I've been in half a dozen WeWork properties in the last 2 months and I've yet to see one more than 50% occupied. There were a couple buildings in Seattle that seemed almost empty.

Despite all their shortcomings (and I have ranted about them on here a lot in the past), the seem to have close to a 100% occupancy in Berlin. It does often look like they are less occupied though (partial empty offices) because the claim of "you can easily move to a bigger office" isn't true and companies rent offices that are bigger than they need them to be.

But what occupancy % is needed to do well? Considering you could easily pay rent with a 50% time occupancy AirBnB, maybe it's similar to WeWork.

People are using their offices on large discounts

I have no idea but I bet even Walmart blows the doors off them in terms of commercial sq footage.

Doesn't Walmart own most of their real estate though? If so, they wouldn't be in the running for largest commercial lessee. Although it wouldn't surprise me if Walmart does have the largest square footage of commercial real estate, if you count parking lots & distribution centers it would be huge.

Another odd thought--would you count an oil company like halliburton's well leases? I know that square footage is normally used for buildings as to account for multiple stories, but if we count commercial land leases then either an oil/gas company or a large agribusiness would almost certainly come out on top.

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