CBRE Reports Record Revenues As Its Stock Price Falls Another 12%

CBRE, the world's largest commercial real estate company, posted a jump in profit and revenues as it rides the wave of artificial intelligence demand, but fears over that same technology's ability to upend the brokerage model continued to drag its share price down on Thursday.

The global brokerage firm increased revenue by 12% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, delivering $818M in core adjusted net income to shareholders, a 15% boost from last year. Management expects the brokerage’s customer base will continue coming back to the leasing and sales tables, predicting its earnings to grow by 17% in 2026. 

CBRE’s stock was trading up by more than 3% in premarket trading after the fourth-quarter results were released, but that dynamic flipped by the time markets opened, continuing a broad sell-off of brokerage shares on Wall Street that began Wednesday. The Dallas-based firm's shares had fallen by 12% by the late morning.

The sell-off was a continuation of a battering of public valuations for the five major brokerages, which each slipped by at least 11% on Wednesday. Some analysts attributed the market dip to fears over AI’s ability to replace brokerages for certain services.

On a call with analysts, CBRE CEO Bob Sulentic dismissed AI's potential to replace brokers, who he said are still the bread and butter of its business, citing the physical nature of commercial real estate assets.

“We don't get our brokerage leads online somewhere,” he said. “We get our brokerage leads because of deep knowledge about the occupiers and investors in the marketplace.”

He argued that the brokerage sector is broadly protected against AI disruption because of its reliance on individual expertise and that CBRE’s dominant market position gives it access to a competitive set of data that outcompetes publicly available information that large language models could ingest.  

“What we're trying to do is enable our brokers, because what we know our clients want is certain things that the brokers bring to the table,” Sulentic said.

Customer demand for AI-related property is fueling a large part of CBRE’s growth, with data centers and digital infrastructure accounting for 14% of the brokerage’s $3.3B in core earnings in 2025. In the fourth quarter, CBRE posted $1.3B in core earnings, up 19% from the prior year.

“We had a strong end to 2025,” Sulentic said on the earnings call. “Fourth-quarter revenue and core EPS rose by double digits, with both reaching their highest levels ever for CBRE.” 

AI is also expected to unlock significant savings for CBRE, most immediately through improvements to its data collection and analysis operations, which would allow it to cut support staff while continuing a push to bulk up its broker bench.  

“We can be empirical about the savings we think we're going to be able to save over this year, maybe extending in the next year, about 25% of the cost of our research work,” Sulentic said. 

CBRE pulled in $40.6B of revenue in 2025, a 13% increase from 2024. Revenue in CBRE’s advisory services, which includes leasing and valuations, grew in Q4 by 13% year-over-year, led by demand in Europe. U.S. sales revenue was up 27%, with increased volume from office and multifamily deals. 

Its building operations and experience segment, which includes property management and consulting, pulled in $6.3B in revenue, up 15% year-over-year. 

Management is projecting continued growth in transaction volumes across sales and leasing in 2026. Industrial occupiers are proactively looking to renew, move or expand space well before leases expire and office demand has returned, helped by the explosion of new AI firms adding to demand, Sulentic said. 

“It would be very difficult to sit here today and say there's going to be less office space as a result of AI in the foreseeable future, over the next few years,” Sulentic said.

He acknowledged the technology's long-term potential to help firms cut headcount but said those efficiency gains could be offset by new roles that AI necessitates.

“We're in one of the sweet spots we've been in in my entire career for office-based leasing,” he said. 

Analysts largely dismissed the dramatic sell-off — which has erased roughly $12B of CBRE's market valuation in a matter of days — as an overreaction. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analyst Jade Rahmani said the retreat “may overstate the immediate risk to complex deal-making.” 

JPMorgan Chase analysts called the pullback a “buying opportunity” for the stock while acknowledging that AI panic pressures could persist.

“If anything, the outlook for the transactional businesses are better than expected, especially leasing, which faces tougher comps as the year progresses,” JPMorgan Chase analysts wrote in a note after the earnings were released. “The challenge is that ‘fighting the tape’ right now is tough given the broad (even if somewhat misplaced in certain areas) concerns around AI, especially if there is the slightest bit of nuance around numbers.”