- Fibra Uno, Mexico's first and largest real estate investment trust, is WeWork's largest global landlord - underscoring the co-working company's international growth.
- Fibra Uno signed a deal with WeWork in October of last year to lease more than a million square feet to WeWork by the end of 2021. At the time of the announcement, Fibra Uno had already leased over 500,000 square feet to WeWork.
- WeWork's overseas revenue has been surging- international locations made up 40% of total revenue by the second half of 2018, up from 28% in the first quarter of 2017.
- Read more of BI's WeWork coverage here.
WeWork may be Manhattan's biggest office space tenant, but their top landlord doesn't hold any real estate within 2,000 miles of the island.
The co-working company has provided Business Insider with a look at its top landlords, and the full rankings have not previously been reported. Many of the names on the list were US-based real estate companies, but Mexico's Fibra Uno was at the top.
That underscores how quickly nine-year-old WeWork has been growing overseas - according to a company financial presentation, more than 40% of WeWork's revenue by the end of 2018 came from international growth.
WeWork is known for its trendy office space, which it leases itself and then rents out to customers like startups - and increasingly, big corporate clients. Its valuation has ballooned to $47 billion and it is now laying the groundwork to go public. It is far from profitable, though - it notched a $1.93 billion net loss on $1.82 billion in revenue last year.
Fibra Uno is Mexico's first and largest real estate investment trust (REIT.) It was formed in 2011 and now owns more than 95 million square feet over 559 properties. The company has been led by Andre El-Mann Arazi since its founding, and grew out of the El-Mann family's real estate holdings in Mexico.
Fibra Uno signed a deal with WeWork in October of last year to lease over a million square feet to WeWork by the end of 2021. At the time of the announcement, Fibra Uno had leased over 500,000 square feet to WeWork. Fibra Uno also works with other Mexican and international co-working firms, but says that WeWork is their largest client in the space.
Fibra Uno's size and reach across the country is the reason that WeWork has worked so closely with Fibra Uno, according to Jorge Pigeon, VP of capital markets and investor relations. WeWork does work with other Mexico landlords, but not at the scale as with Fibra Uno.
"In terms of total office space in Mexico, there are six million square meters," said Pigeon. "We have 1.2 million square meters of that."
According to Fibra Uno's most recent quarterly report, only 1.4% of the company's revenue comes from WeWork. Their most lucrative tenant is Walmart's Mexico unit, which provides 8.6% of their revenue. More than a third of Fibra Uno's properties are in Mexico City, which is also the area where they have the largest concentration of office buildings.
The real estate company is also the first Latin American company to sign a sustainability-linked loan, according to a Thursday statement. A sustainability-linked loan is a loan with a variable interest rate that adjusts based off of how well the company does on certain sustainability metrics. Spanish bank BBVA serviced the $1.1 billion dollar loan.