With lenders getting cold feet, WeWork is a victim of its own success

Its business model- locking in space on long-term leases, then filling it with short-term tenants-has been hard for others to embrace

The owner of a London office building negotiated a lease with a company that wanted all eight floors. To his surprise, his bankers at ING Groep NV shot it down.

ING balked because a single tenant, WeWork Cos., would be responsible for paying all the rent. And the Dutch bank isn’t alone. Increasingly, lenders in Europe are cooling toward the co-working giant, which started with six floors in a tenement-style building in New York’s SoHo district nine years ago, and now has 45 million square feet (4.2 million square meters) of office space around the world. For context, that’s nearly equal