CBRE Group, Inc. (CBRE) operates as a commercial real estate services and investments company worldwide.
The company’s competitive advantage comes from its considerable scale and ability to offer integrated solutions to real estate investors and occupiers in more than 100 countries. The company is global market leaders in most of its lines of business and drives significant growth from bundling its services, while helping clients optimize real estate costs, value, investment returns and workpla...
CBRE Group, Inc. (CBRE) operates as a commercial real estate services and investments company worldwide.
The company’s competitive advantage comes from its considerable scale and ability to offer integrated solutions to real estate investors and occupiers in more than 100 countries. The company is global market leaders in most of its lines of business and drives significant growth from bundling its services, while helping clients optimize real estate costs, value, investment returns and workplace experiences. These capabilities, combined with its extensive knowledge platform (research, data, strategy, etc.), allow the company to generate superior outcomes for its clients, which include nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies in 2024, and many of the world’s largest institutional real estate investors.
The company’s growth opportunity is enhanced by the large and expanding total addressable market for its services. The company is focused on cementing its leadership position in each of its businesses with a strategy that achieves diversification and growth across four dimensions: geographies, clients, property types and services. The company is committed to deploying its resources and capital across these four dimensions in parts of its business that benefit from secular tailwinds and/or provide cyclical resilience. Examples of how the company has expanded its participation in secularly favored and resilient businesses and enlarged the company’s total addressable market include its investments in the global project management firm, Turner & Townsend, in which the company holds a majority ownership interest; the flexible office platform, Industrious, in which the company acquired full ownership in January 2025; J&J Worldwide Services, a provider of facilities management and related services to the U.S. federal government; and Direct Line Global, a provider of technical facilities management services to data centers. In addition, the company has increased its focus on geographies, such as Japan, and asset classes, such as industrial, multi-family and data centers, that are positioned for growth. As a result, the company has built a larger and more resilient services offering.
Business Segments
As of December 31, 2024, the company served clients through three business segments: Advisory Services, Global Workplace Solutions and Real Estate Investments, and a fourth segment, called Corporate and other, which encompasses the company’s platform and non-core investments.
On January 1, 2025, the company combined its project management business with its Turner & Townsend subsidiary and increased the company’s ownership in the combined entity to 70%. The company will publicly report financial results for a fourth business segment, Project Management, beginning in the first quarter of 2025. The company also will establish a new business segment, Building Operations & Experience, in 2025, consisted of enterprise and local facilities management, property management and flexible workplace solutions, including Industrious.
The company’s four business segments beginning in 2025 will be (1) Advisory Services; (2) Building Operations & Experience; (3) Project Management; and (4) Real Estate Investments.
Advisory Services
Advisory Services provides a comprehensive range of services globally, including property leasing; capital markets, which includes property sales and mortgage origination; mortgage servicing; valuation and property management. With a global network of experts that have a deep understanding of their local markets, the company offers comprehensive insights and solutions across a wide range of real estate assets, including offices, retail outlets, and critical facilities (including data centers, laboratories, government facilities, manufacturing environments, warehouses, and other mission-critical facilities). The company’s client base is consisted of large occupiers and investors that contract for its services across multi-market portfolios, as well as local market clients that the company serves on a one-off basis.
The company is leader in each of its five primary business lines globally (property leasing, capital markets, mortgage servicing, valuation and property management) and in most key local markets across the world. The company focuses on end-to-end client solutions through the bundling of its various services. For example, as the company’s investor clients seeks to optimize the value and performance of their assets across the real estate lifecycle, the company often brings together expertise from property sales, mortgage originations, leasing, valuations and property management. While many of the company’s business lines in this segment are sensitive to changes in macro-economic conditions, their cyclicality is lessened by the value investors and occupiers place on its insights and consulting services through cycles as they adjust their real estate portfolios and strategies to changing market circumstances. In contrast, the company’s loan servicing, property management and valuations businesses, while a smaller part of its revenue mix, have proven to be more resilient across economic cycles.
Global Workplace Solutions
Global Workplace Solutions (GWS) is the leading global provider of integrated facilities management and project management solutions for major occupiers of commercial real estate. This segment benefits from multiple tailwinds, most notably multi-national corporations’ increased desire to outsource and consolidate real estate services to optimize costs, operational efficiencies, and workplace experiences. The company’s GWS Enterprise business typically serves large global corporations, including many of the Fortune 500, through multi-year contracts, while its GWS Local business meets the needs of smaller occupiers with more localized portfolios.
With facilities management experts in more than 100 countries, the company performs mission-critical technical services and maintenance in more locations worldwide than any other provider. This allows the company to deliver tailored property solutions at both a local and global level, while improving quality and experience. The company provides these services across virtually all asset types, including offices, retail outlets, and critical facilities (including data centers, laboratories, government facilities, manufacturing environments, warehouses, and other mission-critical facilities). The company is investing in superior talent and processes that deliver service excellence; capabilities to perform a wide range of in-house technical services that increase operational efficiency and reliability while lowering costs and carbon emissions; proprietary technology and data solutions that allows the company to amass data at scale and deliver actionable insights to clients for managing complex challenges; and ongoing acquisition activity, including the acquisition of larger companies, such as Norland Managed Services, which marked the company’s entry into the local facilities management space; the Johnson Controls Global Workplace Solutions business, which substantially scaled the company’s core enterprise facilities management business; J&J Worldwide Services, which markedly increased the company’s facilities-related services to the U.S. federal government; and Direct Line Global, which enhanced the company’s capabilities and participation in the data center management space, as well as numerous in-fill transactions.
The company’s project management business delivers program management, project management and cost consultancy services across commercial real estate, infrastructure and natural resources sectors. In early 2025, the company completed its plan to merge its wholly owned CBRE Project Management services business into Turner & Townsend, the company’s majority-owned program and project management subsidiary. The company’s combined capabilities make it a leading global, full-service building consulting, program, project and cost management provider, which completed nearly 50,000 projects/programs in 2024. The company manages a wide range of programs and projects from small repairs/refurbishments in corporate facilities to billion-dollar-plus advanced manufacturing plants to sophisticated infrastructure projects, such as data centers, airports, and power stations. The company also increasingly serve clients for net-zero program management and energy and sustainability solutions. The company’s scale, highly diverse capabilities and technology investments allows it to solve its clients’ biggest challenges in managing capital projects around the world.
Real Estate Investments
Real Estate Investments (REI) is a major real assets developer, investor, and operator. This segment is consisted of two businesses: investment management and real estate development.
CBRE Investment Management (IM) is one of the leading investment platforms for global real assets. IM invests capital on behalf of pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, and other institutional investors in real estate, infrastructure, master limited partnerships and other assets. Its growth opportunity is enhanced by investors’ growing appetite for investment alternatives, including real estate and infrastructure, that diversify their holdings and offer potentially higher returns compared to traditional investment strategies. Much like other parts of the company, IM is diversified across many dimensions – investment strategies, sectors, geographies, risk profiles and execution formats. The company holds a co-investment in many of its investment funds and programs, which span private direct real estate, private indirect real estate through third-party operators, listed real assets and private infrastructure.
The company’s real estate development business – Trammell Crow Company (TCC) provides leading-edge development services to real estate investors, owners and occupiers. TCC has been the largest commercial developer in the U.S. for more than a decade and has a track record of developing best-in-class buildings across multiple property sectors in top-tier markets in the U.S. and Europe. The company’s portfolio represents a diversified mix of projects that are either 100% owned or in which it participates financially via co-investment with strategic capital partners or through fee-based developments, such as built-to-suit projects. The company’s in-process portfolio and pipeline totaled over $32 billion (as of December 31, 2024) and spanned all major asset classes.
The company drives growth in this segment by providing IM and TCC real-time access to the broader CBRE global brand, on-the-ground market intelligence, supplemented by their own investments in research/data, which enables them to identify early and invest in secularly favored markets/products with tailwinds; leveraging CBRE’s balance sheet to create opportunities for co-investment alongside its investor clients in the company’s fund vehicles and developments; and driving strong and ongoing collaboration between IM and TCC.
Intellectual Property
The company holds various trademarks and trade names worldwide, including the CBRE, and Turner & Townsend marks. The CBRE, Turner & Townsend, and Trammell Crow Company marks are vitally important in maintaining the company’s leadership position. The company holds a license to use the Trammell Crow Company trade name pursuant to a license agreement with CF98, L.P., an affiliate of Crow Realty Investors, L.P., d/b/a Crow Holdings.
History
CBRE Group, Inc. was founded in 1906.