Two months after opening its first Twin Cities co-working space, WeWork announced it will double its presence in the market with a 46,000-square-foot shared-working space in Uptown.
WeWork is leasing the fourth and fifth floors of the Ackerberg’s eight-story MoZaic East office building at 2900 Fremont Ave. in Minneapolis, according to Xceligent Inc., a real estate data firm. The Minneapolis-based developer broke ground on the speculative project in September.
The WeWork lease represents a quarter of the 198,000-square-foot building, which will open in late 2018.
“To have an international, cutting-edge operator such as WeWork is a great endorsement of the Uptown area and our MoZaic development,” Ackerberg CEO Stu Ackerberg said in a news release.
WeWork opened its 50,000-square-foot office in downtown's Capella Tower in early October. Based in New York, WeWork now has 170 locations around the world. The co-working model allows members to rent small offices on short-term agreements. It also gives them access to a kitchen and other common areas.
Co-working space is flooding the Twin Cities market. Startup adviser Casey Allen said there will be losers when WeWork expands its presence, mainly the smaller operators that don’t have the marketing power and operational efficiencies that WeWork has.
“I expect three co-working spaces [in the Twin Cities] will shut down in 2018. I don’t know which ones, but some of them don’t have the staying power of tens of millions in the bank like WeWork has,” said Allen, who noted that WeWork is sponsoring his Enterprise Rising Conference in April.
CBRE Minneapolis brokers worked both sides of the deal. Emily Nicollrepresented WeWork while Mark McCary, Larissa Champeau, Brent Karkula and Joe Conzemius represented Ackerberg.
On a tour of WeWork's downtown office space last week, spokesman Leor Reef did not share total membership numbers for the first location, but the three floors in Capella Tower can accommodate 1,000 members at maximum capacity.
Some of the companies already in the space include San Francisco-based online clothing company Stitch Fix and grocery delivery service Instacart.
This post originally appeared on the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal
