CBRE's longtime global president of capital markets plans to retire this year after spending his entire four-decade real estate career at the world's largest commercial property brokerage and leaving behind a history of deal-making and a leadership vacancy.
Christopher Ludeman plans to step down from his post May 1, Real Estate Alert first reported. Ludeman, who works in CBRE's Dallas headquarters, plans to stay on as a senior adviser for the firm through the end of the year, the company said.
CBRE has yet to name a successor. In the interim, three senior capital markets leaders who worked under Ludeman will report directly to advisory services CEO Jack Durburg. The trio of executives who will report to Durburg are Kevin Aussef, president of U.S. investment sales; James Millon, president of U.S. debt and structured finance; and Leo van den Thillart, global head of investment banking.
The firm recently shifted Durburg's role to focus on U.S. and Canadian advisory business. The pivot was made as CBRE Chief Operating Officer Vikram Kohli was given more responsibility at the brokerage firm.
Ludeman began his career at CBRE as a trainee in the early 1980s during the period leading up to the savings-and-loan crisis. He quickly moved through local and regional leadership positions across the United States to head of brokerage, global corporate services and transaction management. In 2011, after the Great Recession, Ludeman took the reins of the firm's global capital markets business.
Industry, Firm Growth
During his leadership of the group, CBRE has ranked as one of the top deal-making brokerage firms across property sectors, with a 23.1% weighted average market share of deals valued at $25 million or more, according to Real Estate Alert data.
At the beginning of Ludeman's career, commercial real estate was "more of a cottage industry, a quirky alternative investment," driven largely by relationships, he said in an interview with Real Estate Alert. That has changed dramatically in the past two decades with capital allocations having increased for commercial property and institutional buyers increasing their investments in the space, he said.
“With institutional capital on the rise, so too did it require higher levels of sophistication in every dimension of the business," Ludeman told the publication, adding that the industry has become highly technical, data-driven and consultative, which has attracted even smarter professionals.
In his tenure, Ludeman saw CBRE grow from a U.S. firm with 600 employees in 30 offices to become a global player in the industry. Today, the firm employs about 130,000 professionals in more than 500 offices in over 100 countries.
Ludeman said the industry is better off today than it was more than 40 years ago.
"The level of both strategic and technical abilities that are required to excel are far above what we had decades ago,” he told Real Estate Alert. “I believe our industry will take significant leaps forward, and its best days are ahead.”
This story was updated on April 25 with an attribution to Real Estate Alert.