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In a move it said was aimed at meeting office tenants’ increasing preference for shorter, more flexible lease terms, commercial real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield announced a $150 million investment in coworking giant WeWork.

“Together, WeWork and Cushman & Wakefield will work to unlock opportunities to provide landlords and businesses with the ability to create a differentiated workplace experience for tenants and employees in the new hybrid world of work where flexibility remains at the forefront,” Cushman & Wakefield said in a statement.

The Cushman & Wakefield investment will take the form of a “non-dilutive backstop equity facility,” it said in its announcement.

The move comes as WeWork is contemplating a second try at an initial public offering, after its first collapsed amid a storm of suspicion about the company’s health, spending and true value.

“As COVID-19 has fundamentally changed the way people work, businesses and landlords have had to rethink their approach to workspace,” WeWork CEO Sandeep Mathrani said in a statement. “Partnering with Cushman & Wakefield will combine WeWork’s industry-leading workplace experience management platform and hospitality-driven Community teams with Cushman’s world class global client and property portfolio to create a solution that helps both landlords and businesses meet the demand for flexible workplaces to fit the changing needs of today’s workforce.”

While the Fairfield County office market continues to lose ground this year, with rents softening, 1.2 million square feet of space on the sublease market and a 16.4 percent vacancy rate at the end of the second quarter, the larger trend Cushman & Wakefield is targeting appears to hold true. In Greenwich, CBRE reported, Manhattan tenants lured to take around half of the 270,000 square feet of office space leased in the town between March 2020 and March 2021 were seeking an average lease term of just over three years, while all other tenants averaged a term of 6.2 years. And local corporate giants Raytheon Technologies and Stanley Black & Decker both recently announced they were transitioning large slices of their office workforce to full-time or part-time remote work.

In Boston, brokerage research shows the majority of area office-lease deals under negotiation this spring were for sublease space, while quarterly data shows the inventory of sublease space ticking down after a multi-million-square-foot high last year.

Downtown employers are hedging, nervous they might “act too quickly and lose a vetted position in the market that has served workers, partners and clients well,” Cushman & Wakefield’s own second-quarter analysis of the Boston office market stated.

In Manhattan, leasing activity improved 13.9 percent in the second quarter compared to the first quarter, while asking rents dropped 0.2 percent, the smallest drop since the pandemic began and a potential signal the market may be stabilizing according to Newmark research. Leasing in sublease space constituted 26 percent of overall leasing activity in the second quarter, CBRE reported, although early indications suggest that the popularity of shorter-term lease renewals is beginning to fade as “occupiers want to strike deals wile a tenant-favorable market lasts.”