WeWork is coming. The United States-based office space provider that started five years ago and now has an estimated valuation of $US10 billion ($14.1 billion) - equal to that of corporate landlords Mirvac and The GPT Group combined - is headed to Australia.
The former start-up, which leases collaborative workspace and promises tenants a community they can tap into, is on the lookout for premises in Sydney. 
"WeWork is active in the market at the moment," one Sydney real estate source said. "They're looking for anything with a significant vacancy around town to see if it works in their model."
The 3000 to 7000 square metres WeWork is apparently looking for is small beer for a company that's leased out a reported 153,290sq m in the US since the start of 2011.
But the slew of co-working spaces and flexible space already on the market - even from non-traditional providers - shows there is clearly a demand for what WeWork offers. Can the local property industry see off the threat?
It's certainly cautious.
"We've got to be very careful, as the owners and curators of buildings, that we're not taken over by the Uber of property," Mirvac's group executive for commercial development, David Rolls, said of WeWork in   March.
WeWork, for its part, is tight-lipped.
"WeWork does not have information to share about expansion plans in Australia at this time," a New York-based spokeswoman said.
Every industry is being disrupted by technology and property is one of them. In Australia, where innovative and flexible workplace design leads the rest of the world, new technology is hardly a foreign concept. GPT is an equity investor in LiquidSpace, which matches users and owners of space through an Uber-like app. Lorenz Grollo's Equiem sells building portal technology that helps landlords make tenants stickier. But WeWork shakes the game up again. The company that leases space to users from individual entrepreneurs to large companies - and offers users free beer - isn't trying to compete with co-working spaces, co-founder and chief executive Adam Neumann told Bloomberg in   May.
"We are competing with offices," Mr Neumann said. "And that is a $US15 trillion asset class in the US."
Not content with repackaging space in buildings owned by others and making it flexible, fun and cool, WeWork in   July said it had partnered with two New York developers to construct the world's first purpose-designed 'collaborative' building, a 63,000sq m property in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The building, which will add to WeWork's 43 locations in 16 US cities, will be completed in late 2017 or early 2018. "No one has ever designed a ground-up building, thinking of collaboration when the building is built," Mr Neumann said.
His partners were equally enthusiastic. "For us, it's the killer app for the office building," William Rudin, the chief executive of developer Rudin Management, told Bloomberg.
But in contrast to the havoc wrought by Uber on the taxi industry, WeWork would complement, rather than rival, the more traditional forms of office use, Mirvac's Mr Rolls said.
Further, the continual renewal seen in office space as tenancies ended and space was upgraded meant the local industry would respond better than taxis, he added.
"With taxi plates, you buy them and you've got them forever, whereas our space is continually evolving."
And rival GPT, which also owns the Space&Co flexible-use sites, said it has a fundamentally different product from WeWork. "In the Melbourne Central [Space&Co], half our usage is from existing tenants within the building," said GPT head of asset management, Matthew Faddy. "The other half is from members who aren't currently in the building. The WeWork model is typically aiming for independent customers."