WeWork Planning to Raise Up to $4 Billion of Debt Ahead of IPO: WSJ

WeWork Cos Inc. has inked a deal to anchor a new office tower being built by a unit of Sun Life Financial Inc. in Vancouver.

New York-based WeWork will occupy 10 floors spanning 170,000 square feet in BentallGreenOak’s new Vancouver development, dubbed B6, according to statements from both companies. The building is 32 stories tall and totals 534,000 square feet, with retail space on the ground floor.

It will be the third-largest office tower in Vancouver, according to BentallGreenOak. The firm has invested about $400 million in the project.

“It’s a very significant project in the city of Vancouver,” Tony Astles, managing partner and head of Canadian real estate services at BentallGreenOak, said in a phone interview. “Over 500,000 square feet of space is not normal here, and we are satisfying the appeal of large tenants.”

Vancouver tied with Toronto in the second quarter for the lowest office vacancy rate in North America, according to CBRE Group Inc. Vancouver’s office vacancy dropped to 2.6 per cent in the second quarter from 4.7 per cent last year, which has helped push rents to record-high rates, CBRE said in a report Tuesday.

Global Tenants

WeWork, which offers shared office space and services for a fee, has been expanding across Canada, with locations in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Burnaby, British Columbia and plans more in the country. Global tenants like Amazon or Google moving into town need large spaces that they often can’t immediately find, Astles said.

“They’re moving whole companies into WeWork operations for a period of a year or two, just so they could move to the next building when it’s complete,” he said.

B6, located at 1090 West Pender St., started construction in January and is slated for completion early 2023. BentallGreenOak will also be a tenant at the building, taking up about 45,000 square feet, Astles said. Sun Life’s real estate arm, Bentall Kennedy, and GreenOak Real Estate merged earlier this year, with Sun Life holding a majority stake in the combined firm.