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CBRE To Acquire Industrious At $800M Valuation

CBRE is moving from shareholder to owner of coworking firm Industrious.

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Industrious was founded in 2012 but rapidly expanded during the pandemic.

The commercial real estate brokerage and services giant announced it would pay roughly $400M to acquire outstanding equity in the coworking firm. The transaction is expected to close this month, with CBRE launching a new business line to support the merger, the company said. 

CBRE has had a roughly 40% equity interest in Industrious since 2020 along with a $100M convertible note. The company’s combined interest in Industrious reflects an implied valuation of roughly $800M. 

“The advancements we’ve announced today support our strategy of investing in resilient businesses that benefit from secular tailwinds, creating new and differentiated products and continually improving the capabilities of our leadership team,” CBRE CEO Bob Sulentic said in a statement.

Industrious has more than 200 locations across 65 cities. Its co-founder and CEO, Jamie Hodari, is going over to CBRE to lead the firm’s new building operations and experience segment, which will unify building operations, workplace experience and property management under one group.

The new division will take up operations for the firm’s 7B SF property management portfolio, which produced roughly $20B in combined revenue in 2024, including CBRE’s investments in Industrious, the company said. 

Vikram Kohli will move from chief operating officer at CBRE to CEO of the firm's advisory services division, its largest business segment.

“The global economy needs physical spaces to make it hum — safe and efficient logistics centers for our goods, magnetic offices for our teams and secure and resilient data centers for our information. Running these spaces with excellence requires sophistication at scale,” Hodari said in a statement. “I have found CBRE to be second-to-none in this respect, and I’m thrilled to be joining — not just because of how great it already is, but because of the opportunity ahead of us.”

Hodari was also named CBRE’s chief commercial officer, responsible for marketing and branding activities across all of the firm’s business lines.

The acquisition and launch of a new vertical will be reflected in the business lines that CBRE reports to investors. The updated segments for 2025 will be advisory services, building operations and experiences, project management and real estate investments. 

CBRE executives have said they view 2025 as the pivot point for commercial real estate markets. The firm posted 22% annual growth in revenue from investment sales in the third quarter and said it expects sales and leasing volume to steadily grow through 2025. 

The firm also announced plans this month to open a 64K SF global financial investment services headquarters on Park Avenue in New York by the end of 2025. Industrious is designing and operating the new office, with some of the space being used by CBRE and some typical Industrious flex space open for other coworking clients. 

The Fed's start of a new monetary easing cycle has recently heightened investor enthusiasm for the real estate services sector,” Sulentic said on the firm’s third-quarter earnings call in October. “We share the market’s enthusiasm and expect to benefit from a capital markets recovery over the next several years.”

Industrious launched as a Brooklyn startup in 2012, pushing a coworking model that rested on management agreements with landlords — a contrast to the leases signed by its much larger and better-known competitor, WeWork

When the pandemic hit, the company began rapidly expanding, with CBRE investing $200M in 2021 and Industrious signing multicity deals with big landlords like Hines and EQ Office.

“We have over the years tried to go to the market with what we thought were reasonable, defensible valuations and multiples that were roughly in line with the big hotel management publicly traded companies or big asset-light business services companies,” Hodari told Bisnow in 2021.

The coworking sector has continued to grow despite headwinds for the traditional office sector, reaching more than 7,500 locations in the U.S. at the end of the third quarter, according to CoworkingCafe.

Nationally, coworking operators occupy 133M SF, and the industry’s footprint grew 5% quarter-over-quarter in the September report. Nearly 5M SF of new space was added in Q3 alone.

“CBRE's acquisition of Industrious is a clear signal of the growing demand for flexibility in the commercial real estate market,” Laura Kozelouzek, the founder of Quest Workspaces, said in an email.

Quest, founded in 2010, also expanded rapidly in the wake of the pandemic, primarily in South Florida.

“This trend towards more adaptable workspace solutions is one we will continue to see going forward, representing a win-win for both the coworking industry and the broader commercial real estate sector,” Kozelouzek said.

CORRECTION, JAN. 14, 11 A.M. ET: Vikram Kohli is moving internally at CBRE to CEO of advisory services.