WeWork Wants to Be More Than Office Space. It Hasn’t Had Much Success.

His vision spans schools, gyms and retail. He even boasted that his rental-apartment venture WeLive would become bigger than WeWork.

That vision remains far off. After investing hundreds of millions of dollars in more than half a dozen side businesses like education, wellness and short-term apartment rentals, We has struggled to demonstrate that any of them are the fast-growth profit centers the company had envisioned.

Some of them stalled soon after We announced them. The company has scaled back the expansion of others, former employees with knowledge of the businesses say. WeLive manages only two apartment buildings, with a third one planned, compared with more than 500 locations world-wide for the core co-working business.

In 2018, the company spent at least $164 million on businesses other than co-working, but it made only $124 million in revenue from all ancillary ventures, according to a recent public filing.

Some analysts believe this is fine. The office industry alone offers more than enough room for growth, they say. Analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. put We’s valuation around $23 billion, and in an August note wrote that We’s “business model is sound and the pace of growth phenomenal.”

And efforts closer to We’s core business have had better results. The company has had rapid growth in its “enterprise” division, where it woos large corporations as tenants. Those large companies now make up more than 40% of the company’s business, up from 20% in early 2017.

But We has bigger aims. The recent corporate name change to We Co. from WeWork reflects Mr. Neumann’s desire to recast the company as grander than subletting shared office space. We executives have long portrayed the company as far more than that, pointing to a diverse suite of products that could help support a loftier stock valuation.

Instead, with a reliance on a single, volatile business for nearly all its growth, We has struggled to convince many potential investors that it is more than a real-estate-leasing company. That is one reason that investment bankers advising the initial public offering expect We’s valuation to drop to as little as one-third of its prior $47 billion valuation as it prepares to go public, people familiar with the offering have said. On Tuesday, We postponed its IPO, which is now expected after mid-October, at the earliest.

We’s ambitions to offer other services have come up short in a number of ways and for a variety of reasons.

Powered By We, the company’s business to design, renovate and manage other offices already leased or owned by other companies, has also disappointed. Its profit on many early construction projects have been meager or nonexistent. Key customers have spurned add-ons like janitorial services and software, though margins on recent projects are higher, according to people familiar with the matter.

We has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on acquisitions, with little to show for it. It paid nearly $400 million for four tech-focused companies between 2017 and 2018, including search-engine-optimization company Conductor Inc., Meetup.com and Flatiron School coding academy, according to public filings. The ventures received little mention in the prospectus, suggesting their contribution to overall revenue has been minimal.

Mr. Neumann is an avid surfer, and in 2016 We invested $13.8 million in a company that makes large pools with surf waves. In a bond filing two years later, it marked the value of the investment down to zero after business tailed off. We executives have said business since then has improved.

WeLive’s slow start after such high expectations illustrates how We has struggled to find its footing with other real-estate businesses. Mr. Neumann introduced the unit as a communal-living concept, where customers have their own bedrooms or studio apartments but share common areas with others.

In a 2014 presentation to investors, the company predicted that WeLive would account for $605.9 million in revenue by 2018.

The business never got off the ground. WeLive aimed to charge millennials a premium to live in shared apartments with flexible lease terms. But the company has been facing sometimes cheaper competition from an increasing number of co-living operators like Common and Ollie offering a similar product.

A surge in new construction brought down high-end apartment rents in parts of New York City, making it harder for WeLive to charge premium rents, while new developments offering amenities like game rooms, gyms and bars proved strong competitors to WeLive.

We also found that converting office buildings into apartments was more challenging and expensive than it initially realized, people familiar with the business say. That is in part because building floor plates—the size and shape of floors in a building—often aren’t designed in a way that maximizes apartment rental income.

In a WeLive building in lower Manhattan, the company and its landlord spent $42 million to turn 21 floors in a former office tower into furnished, shared apartments, according to an offering prospectus for the building. The building’s residential portion has struggled to turn a profit since it opened in April 2016, according to people briefed on its financials.

We has shifted gears, pulling back from the co-living communal approach in favor of a business model closer to a traditional hotel. The company plans to increase the number of units used as hotel rooms at the WeLive Manhattan location to 125 this year, up from 85, and to decrease the number of residential units to 80, according to the prospectus.

—Keiko Morris contributed to this article.

Write to Konrad Putzier at [email protected] and Eliot Brown at [email protected]