That's certainly a valid concern (disintermediation) and arises for many marketplaces. Like many other marketplaces, WW can add functionality that makes booking and managing through its platform a lot more convenient than doing it directly. Some amount of disintermediation is inevitable but it can be minimized.
Hi Andrei, I think the disintermediation for real estate is inevitable. For office space (which is a b2b business), offline connection to view the space is critical and transaction is hard to establish online but offiline(contracts are usually longer and for months/years hence harder to complete online). This is different than airbnb or booking.com (travel platform) where it is expensive to connect/view while booking, hence it locked by the platform. But there's certainly something to do to prevent it from happening. one is to provide more information (picture and in-depth personal introduction video) so that customer can view it easily, the other could be leveraging platform's advantage (offering flexiblty, simplicty and protection) to tenants so that they don't have to deal with landlord and has someone to look for when they have disputes or service issue with landlord. But, to establish a platform business for office leasing or real estate seems to be much harder than other business (like doordash, uber and airbnb).
What would stop customers from going directly and contracting directly with the landlords once they find them on the WeWork platform?
That's certainly a valid concern (disintermediation) and arises for many marketplaces. Like many other marketplaces, WW can add functionality that makes booking and managing through its platform a lot more convenient than doing it directly. Some amount of disintermediation is inevitable but it can be minimized.
Hi Andrei, I think the disintermediation for real estate is inevitable. For office space (which is a b2b business), offline connection to view the space is critical and transaction is hard to establish online but offiline(contracts are usually longer and for months/years hence harder to complete online). This is different than airbnb or booking.com (travel platform) where it is expensive to connect/view while booking, hence it locked by the platform. But there's certainly something to do to prevent it from happening. one is to provide more information (picture and in-depth personal introduction video) so that customer can view it easily, the other could be leveraging platform's advantage (offering flexiblty, simplicty and protection) to tenants so that they don't have to deal with landlord and has someone to look for when they have disputes or service issue with landlord. But, to establish a platform business for office leasing or real estate seems to be much harder than other business (like doordash, uber and airbnb).