This gets the dynamic wrong though - WeWork has long term contracts with their suppliers and short term contracts with their customers. So what actually happens

This gets the dynamic wrong though - WeWork has long term contracts with their suppliers and short term contracts with their customers. So what actually happens in a recession: 1. Businesses cancel their WeWork spaces because they're laying people off with 0-6 months notice. 2. WeWork has to eat the cost of low-occupancy buildings until their leases are up for renewal - which could be 5, 10 years down the line. 3. As the market heats back up WeWork change charge a lot for the office leases they established cheaply during the recession giving them low cost, high value rental spaces. Notice how at stage 2 you're going to have a few years where you've got a drop in revenue but high fixed costs? Normal office rental companies plan for this because of the cyclical nature of the market. The question you've got to answer is can WeWork weather that storm - and I would've though it obvious that it's in a bad position since right now they have $6.6Bn cash and lose $2Bn a year. Also I've got to challenge you on this: >3. Other companies will look to close down their own satellite offices and transfer workers to WeWork sites for cost savings. I think this is just utterly implausible. Companies don't shut down their satellite offices to move workers into smaller more expensive per head offices. What is far more likely to happen is that they cut head count and use the spare office space in their head office to close down satellite offices and move them to headquarters and close down small offices and move them to regional offices. That effect will reduce demand for WeWork, not increase it. Take Intel as an example of this: When they wanted to reduce head count the first step was to shut down failing projects and fire under performing employees. Their second step was then to use the spare space in their large offices to shut down small offices and consolidate into their big offices. All their big offices are offices they own or have extremely long term rents on, all the offices they didn't were much smaller and much more likely to be rental spaces - which is why it saved money to shut them down in the first place.