Introduction to CBRE
Nestled in its Uptown home, commercial real estate brokerage CBRE is among the 500 most valuable publicly traded companies in the world, outpacing the likes of Ford, Kroger and Hershey.
It’s come a long way from the doldrums of the Great Recession, when it ended 2008 with a $1.13 billion market cap, its lowest valuation since it went public four years earlier.
At the time, the lion’s share of its revenue stemmed from transactional businesses, which included property sales, leasing, mortgage origination and development fees.
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The company has since diversified its holdings, tapping the many verticals of the real estate industry to shield itself from economic downturns.
CBRE calls these ventures “resilient businesses,” which include facilities management, project management, loan servicing, valuations, property management and recurring investment management fees.
Ideally, these ventures would be agnostic to the vagaries of economic ups and downs, rooted in services that are always in need.
“When we talk about resilience today, what we mean is one of two things: either cyclically, it performs independent of the traditional real estate cycle … or it’s a business that has secular tailwinds,” said Bob Sulentic, who assumed the mantle of CEO with CBRE in 2012.
With Sulentic at the helm, the company has executed on its vision to diversify its revenue streams by tapping myriad commercial real estate verticals.
“It’s important to note that, when I came into the company, we already had some important revenue streams. We were already a big manager of buildings, and we already had a decent-sized project management business. With Trammell Crow, we had a decent-sized development business,” Sulentic said. “But they were smaller relative to where they are today.”
At the end of the third quarter, CBRE’s market cap sat at $46.55 billion, a growth of more than 40 times since it hit those Great Recession lows.
Building Resilience
The share of CBRE’s earnings from resilient businesses has nearly doubled in just over a decade. In 2012, resilient businesses made up 32% of the company’s earnings; today, they represent about 60% to 62%.
“If you went back a little over a decade, [resilient revenue] was 32%. Now it’s almost double,” Sulentic said. “It’s not because we de-emphasized brokerage or development, it’s because we built the other parts of the business so substantially.”
People work and chat in the RISE Café seating area at CBRE’s global headquarters in Dallas on Thursday, July 25, 2024.
Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer
According to financial documents published by the company, sales and leasing revenue has ramped up from just below $3 billion in 2012 to over $6 billion in 2025.
Those transactional services, however, have given way to resilient business ventures making up the greatest portion of its revenue.
Since 2012, CBRE has bolstered its resilient business ventures with 118 acquisitions, deploying $5.3 billion in capital, fortifying its existing market footprint in various regions.
It also made several strategic acquisitions, including Norland Managed Services, which became the foundation of its local facilities management operations. The acquisition of Global Workplace Solutions from Johnson Controls significantly ramped up CBRE’s facilities management capabilities.
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It also acquired a majority stake in Turner & Townsend, a global project management firm that added infrastructure capabilities to CBRE’s line of real estate verticals.
It also more recently acquired Direct Line Global to strengthen its data center management services, J&J Worldwide to bolster federal government and Department of Defense facilities management and Industrious, a leading flexible workplace operator.
Guiding Vision
The company’s growth beyond transactional services was facilitated within what Sulentic refers to
