'Somebody Has to Execute The Deal': JLL CEO Dismisses AI Fears, Promises Stock Buybacks
JLL CEO Christian Ulbrich isn’t particularly worried about artificial intelligence derailing the brokerage’s growth.
“At the end of the day, somebody has to execute the deal,” Ulbrich told analysts on the firm’s fourth-quarter earnings call Wednesday morning.
“There will always be human interaction for pretty much everything you see within our space. Whether at some point you can completely cut out human interaction — I think we are very far away from that,” he added.
He had reason to be optimistic. Fourth-quarter profits were up 67% year-over-year to $402M on $7.6B in revenue, with the global brokerage’s transactional revenues like leasing and sales up 15%. It also reported 9% growth across its resilient business segment, which includes property management and portfolio services.
JLL ended the year with roughly $1B in free cash flow, and management said it was prioritizing returning value to shareholders. The brokerage repurchased $80M worth of shares in the fourth quarter and $212M across 2025, and Ulbrich said the stock remained an attractive buyback option even before last week’s brokerage stock sell-off, ostensibly driven by fears over AI’s disruptive power.
The CEO said concerns about disintermediation, which is broadly defined as eliminating middle steps in the supply chain and effectively means loss of relevance in the brokerage world, were overblown.
“With regards to JLL, we looked at it, and we looked at it again after last week's stock price decline — whether we are missing a trick here — and honestly, we cannot see anything at the horizon which will disrupt parts of our business in the next couple of years,” Ulbrich said. “And we cannot look further out than there. The momentum is very fast on AI.”
Revenue from leasing advisory services totaled $1B in the fourth quarter, up 18% year-over-year, driven by growing momentum in office leasing and a notably strong 28% increase in revenue from U.S. activity.
Ulbrich said demand for office space was at its highest level since 2019. Conversely, Chief Financial Officer Kelly Howe said the in-house view was that industrial leasing had bottomed out and was rebuilding momentum that would accelerate across 2026.
Capital markets services revenue was up 21% from last year to $854M, which management attributed to growth in investment sales and debt advisory services across nearly all sectors, with the most activity coming from office trades.
“Investor confidence is rising,” Ulbrich said. “More investors are deploying capital, and real estate debt markets remain robust, which we expect will lead to further growth in 2026.”
JLL’s stock was up more than 5% in early trading Wednesday after a sell-off last week in which the stock and its peers slid by more than 10% in a single day.
The so-called AI scare trade spread across markets and beyond real estate stocks last week and into trading on Tuesday, but many of the hardest-hit firms were trading in positive territory Wednesday morning.
CBRE, a JLL rival and the world’s largest real estate company, posted its own record fourth-quarter earnings results last week, and CEO Bob Sulentic addressed the concerns about AI head-on in his opening comments on the earnings call, but the stock nonetheless slipped 12% during the trading day amid the sell-off. Shares were up more than 5% in Wednesday trading.
Ulbrich said JLL’s scale and proprietary data gave it a competitive advantage over any AI-driven platform, which echoed Sulentic’s arguments for why CBRE was insulated from AI impacts.
“I don't want to come across kind of naive about the threat which AI may offer, but for the time being, we don't see any competitive pressure from outside of our industry,” Ulbrich said. “And within our industry, I think we are extremely well positioned to take benefit of AI.”
