What does the WeWork acquisition of Conductor mean for the Commercial Real Estate industry?

While WeWork’s ambitious goals should be no surprise to anyone paying attention, this move might seem a little puzzling to CRE.

It shouldn’t be.

WeWork’s most recent growth has been driven by the enterprise – organizations with 1000+ employees. They now say their enterprise members include 22% of the Fortune 500.

That is a far cry from the small startups and individuals that drove their start, fueled their rise, and now puts them in direct competition for customers with the very buildings they occupy space in.

I have always believed that, at their core, WeWork is a technology company with a powerful marketing engine to drive their growth.

Not only does this acquisition of Conductor (an SEO and marketing company) give them access to Conductor’s large enterprise customer base, it gives them a platform to effectively reach more of these organizations moving forward. According to a WeWork blog post, “Conductor serves over 1,000 brands around the world, improving the online presence of major corporations including Citibank, Salesforce, CVS, and more.”

As a marketer, I think this is a brilliant strategy.

In order to scale, you need to reach as many people as possible with your message. Marketing technology such as the Conductor platform allows them to do just that and to do it very efficiently.

In a Techcrunch article, Conductor co-founder and CEO Seth Besmertnik said now that Conductor is part of WeWork, “We’re going to be building a marketing cloud to go after the enterprise market.”

For CRE companies that typically rely on broker relationships and their brand alone to attract customers, this should be viewed as a competitive play by WeWork and an opportunity to revisit their own customer acquisition strategy, tools and tactics.  

Read a Beginners Guide to Commercial Property Marketing on the Building Engines blog.