Graham Clemett was the unflashy chief financial officer who became Workspace Group's chief executive in 2020, just in time to face the post-pandemic question that mattered most for any London office landlord: would anyone want office space again, and if so, what kind?
Five years on, his answer is a FTSE 250 real-estate investment trust running at a long-run high of nearly 90% occupancy across a portfolio of approximately 4 million square feet of small and mid-size London buildings, mostly inside Zone 3, with average lease lengths under three years and an average customer headcount of fewer than 25 employees.
The Workspace model in one sentence
Workspace owns its buildings outright, refurbishes them into flexible suites, and rents them under shorter, more amenity-rich leases than a traditional landlord would offer. Customers are not signing 10-year traditional leases; they are typically taking 12 to 36-month commitments on space ranging from 250 to 5,000 square feet.
That model looked exotic before the pandemic. It looks like the future of small-business office real estate after it.
The WeWork comparison Clemett rejects
Clemett has repeatedly and explicitly rejected the analogy with WeWork, the US-listed coworking operator that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in late 2023. The difference, in his framing, is balance sheet: Workspace owns its underlying real estate, whereas WeWork leased it.
"When a tenant has a bad month, our cost base does not move," Clemett told analysts on the November 2024 results call, in what was widely read as a coded reference to the WeWork model. "When a tenant has a great month, our economics do."
The result has been an unusual outcome in a real-estate cycle that has been brutal for most listed UK landlords: rising rents, falling vacancy and a dividend that has been increased annually for the last three financial years. Workspace's net tangible asset per share has held up better than most peers through the 2023–2024 interest-rate shock that wiped roughly a fifth off the value of the wider listed UK REIT sector.
The post-WeWork land grab
The collapse of WeWork's UK estate, and the gradual unwinding of several other coworking landlords, has handed Workspace a once-in-a-cycle land grab. Clemett has been disciplined about which assets to absorb, he reportedly walked away from several inner-zone freeholds at last year's distressed sales, on the basis that the underlying building would not refurbish into the Workspace standard at sensible cost.
What he has bought, in 2024 and 2025, is a handful of mid-size former office buildings in Hackney, Bermondsey and Battersea, all of which match Workspace's existing customer-density profile. Investors have rewarded the discipline: the shares trade close to net asset value, an unusual rating for a UK REIT in 2025.
What's next
Clemett has hinted at a return to acquisitions in the regions, beyond the M25. Outside London has historically been off-strategy for Workspace; the chief executive has said publicly that this might no longer be the case, with Manchester and Bristol explicitly on the radar. Whether he can replicate the London formula in markets where flex-office demand is still developing will be the question that defines the rest of his tenure.
