WeWork has opened a new headquarters offices in San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower and is now the city’s fourth-largest tenant.
The coworking firm has taken over three stories of the city’s tallest building where both WeWork employees and clients will work.
WeWork is the largest coworking space operator in the world, pushing the transformation of the real estate market through building shared offices, then renting them out to startups and corporations, such as Facebook.
Since last year, the company has doubled its San Francisco office footprint at 1.43 million square feet, barley trailing behind major companies such as Wells Fargo and Uber.
“The original roots of WeWork in San Francisco are a much more old-school building,” said Jon Slavet, WeWork managing director of U.S. and Canada West.
Their new location has 700 desks, half of which will be for WeWork employees. The other half will be a coworking space which is already at capacity. The Salesforce Tower office will also have a gym and coffee shop, as well as weekly communal meals for everyone in the space.
Just last month, Japanese conglomerate announced it would invest $3 billion into WeWork, giving the company a $45 billion valuation.
Despite this growth, some real estate experts say that coworking operators will hurt if there is a recession. In this case, it is likely that demand for office space will decrease, but premier coworking spaces like the Salesforce Tower will attract larger businesses seeking short-term leases, according to Colin Yasukochi, research director at brokerage CBRE in San Francisco.
