CBRE, the world's largest commercial real estate services firm, raised its annual profit outlook after reporting its biggest quarterly gain in almost four years, fueled partly by its data center land development business.
The Dallas-based brokerage, the first major firm of its kind to report earnings for the initial months of 2026, said revenue jumped 19% to $10.5 billion from the same time the prior year. Earnings exceeded expectations, CBRE executives said, continuing into the second quarter. That spurred the firm to raise its core per-share earnings outlook for the year to $7.60 to $7.80 from $7.30 to $7.60.
“CBRE continued to generate strong financial results while making important strategic gains during the first quarter of 2026," Chair and CEO Bob Sulentic told investors and analysts during the firm's earnings call Thursday.
CBRE's year-over-year growth in revenue is its largest since the second quarter of 2022, a return to "record earnings" that didn't occur by happenstance, executives said.
"We've aimed at business in areas that we thought had secular tailwinds," Sulentic said. "Coming out of [the pandemic era], CBRE was and continues to be a massive office building business, and [the pandemic] hammered everything about office buildings.
"But we moved aggressively into industrial and multifamily land and development and, we're back to record earnings," he added.
The quarter's financial gains were also driven by strong growth of its so-called resilient businesses, including project management, facilities management and data center management, as well as its transactional businesses such as leasing and property trades, Sulentic said. CBRE is at work on over 1,300 data centers globally.
Profits from the firm's data center land development program were also "delivered earlier in the year than anticipated," Sulentic added.
Over at CBRE's development arm, Trammell Crow Co., its portfolio that includes data center land development, industrial and apartment sites saw gains of more than $900 million in the first quarter, marking a significant start to 2026. That's almost one-third of the division's profit for the full year in 2025 of more than $3 billion.
"We also, around the country, have secured dozens of land sites that have the potential to be data center land sites over time," Sulentic said. "We're working with various data center users to get that land entitled, get that land powered [and] get water to the land.
"We think we'll have a relatively steady stream of opportunities and data center land [revenue] over the next few years," he added. "It will be lumpy, as evidenced by the first quarter."
AI move
The rise in artificial intelligence, concerns of which rocked for a time last quarter the stock of CBRE as well as its rivals, has created opportunities for CBRE, Sulentic said.
"Our move into critical infrastructure and data center services is going to be at least as profound as our move into outsourcing in the 1990s and early 2000s and much faster," Sulentic said, adding this also gives CBRE strong opportunities for potential mergers and acquisitions given the firm's track record and history.
Even with real estate opportunities created by AI, CBRE's seasoned executives helping clients strategize are fairly insulated from any AI-related job effects, Sulentic said. Sulentic said there's too much creativity, strategy and negotiations involved in commercial real estate deals for AI to threaten those roles.
Still, CBRE anticipates an unspecified amount of job loss in certain areas, with the firm already having AI initiatives underway to create efficiencies in the company, he added.
"For instance, we have [thousands] of people in call centers around the world, and we think we can rationalize that maybe as much as 25%," Sulentic said, adding the firm plans to make cuts to its research area, financial planning and analysis as well as human resources.
CBRE's Chief Operating Officer Vikram Kohli is overseeing this effort, Sulentic said. Kohli was recently awarded $5 million as part of his significance to the firm's long-term succession plan.
Business boom
For CBRE's real estate brokers, business was good with leasing revenue growing 21% in the United States, led by industrial, office and data centers. Globally, leasing revenue grew 18%.
Emma Giamartino, CBRE's chief financial officer, said the leasing momentum was driven by occupiers continuing to "act ahead of tightening supply for first-generation, big-box facilities." The U.S. office leasing revenue increased by 15%, she added, with "broad-based strength" across both gateway and non-gateway markets.
"Additionally, data center leasing revenue more than tripled from last year's first quarter," she added.
Property trades also hit it big in the first quarter with global sales revenue increasing 39% from the prior year's first quarter, led by the United States and the Asia-Pacific region, Giamartino said. Specifically, U.S. property sales revenue increased 64% across all major property types, she added.
Revenue also boomed by 65% for the firm's critical infrastructure services group that includes the newly acquired Pearce Services, a business that adds infrastructure to sites and works heavily in telecommunications and power. Infrastructure work in the United Kingdom and Ireland helped CBRE's project management segment grow its revenue by 11%.
The first quarter's outperformance is expected to impact CBRE's expectations for the year, with 40% of earnings per share expected in the first half of the year, Giamartino said. The revised financial outlook for the year assumes no big changes to the macroeconomic environment, she added.