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Like any big, multi city real estate broker, the benefit of scale is diversification over local real estate markets, and less risk.

A single WeWork in one city is risky due to fluctuations in real estate, economics, labor supply, competition, etc. a thousand locations are less risky, since the company can still exist even if a local market tanks for a year.

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OTOH setting up a coworking space is not risky for real estate owners. Couple of desks and a coffee machine. Wework may be setting itself up to be airbnb'd by everyone who has available space in the future.

But doesn't that mean that WeWork could become the AirBnB by making itself the app/website where all of these independent landlords list their office spaces and where workers go to rent them?

Many sites , e.g. Coworker.co already exist . Running such a website seems to be easier than running an airbnb - the leases are daily passes and they dont seem to worry about cleaning fees & damages etc. The main takeaway for wework is that they are in the real estate space, this is an uber-competitive and regulated space which has been "disrupted" for millenia

Global real estate markets are increasingly correlated so that geographic diversification no longer benefits a portfolio very much.

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