When it comes to cautionary global business tales, all roads seem to lead to WeWork. I have been thinking about the short-term office space company, and not only because of the lawsuit some of its board members issued last week against investor SoftBank over its decision to pull out of a share buyout.
What is striking is the broader lessons WeWork’s travails provide — especially for a post-Covid-19 world. Among them: debt matters; corporate valuations were unsustainable even before the crisis; nobody is going to be rushing to lease office space anytime soon; and real estate in many parts of both the residential and commercial sectors has far, far further to fall.
The coronavirus pandemic has triggered a corporate debt crisis that has been long coming. WeWork epitomises the excess that led to this crash. Its troubles also offer a hint of what is still to come — namely a long period of falling property prices in prime global cities in North America and parts of Europe, as the second big global real estate bubble of this millennium deflates.