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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 far back as May 2020, Boston-area office tenants began drifting towards shorter-term leases on office space, with Newmark reporting in May that the majority of area office lease deals then under negotiation were for sublease space, which had flooded onto the area market during 2020. It’s a trend that repeated itself in the major CRE brokerages’ quarterly market reports last month with the overall inventory of sublease space downtown shrinking by 3.7 percent over the quarter, Newmark reported.

Asking rents rose to $67.18 in the second quarter, and now are just 30 cents below pre-pandemic levels, according to CBRE, while vacancies remained flat at 11.9 percent and availabilities rose to 19.2 percent.

Downtown employers are 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, although several big deals – notably, Facebook’s stated intent to triple the square-footage it occupies in Cambridge’s Kendall Square – show some employers are still set on maintaining large physical presences in downtown core.

“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.”