Higher interest rates are already having an impact on the world's largest commercial real estate brokerage, but CBRE's profits and revenue are growing anyway because of its push into the red-hot data center sector.

CBRE brought in $11.5B in revenue in the third quarter, a 13% year-over-year increase, according to its third-quarter earnings report, released Thursday. Its net income of $443M was up 22% from Q3 2025, and its free cash flow grew from $779M to $927M.

The Dallas-based company now expects deal activity, particularly for capital markets transactions, to soften through the second half of next year.

Office leasing revenue in the U.S. declined 2% year-over-year, which CEO Bob Sulentic attributed to two large deals slipping into the fourth quarter.

"Deals that were under contract are getting retraded," Sulentic said on the company's earnings call Thursday morning. "Deals that might have otherwise gone under contract aren't happening. We're seeing refinancings in some places that we thought would see sales."

But its critical infrastructure business, which includes data center and related energy work, is booming. CBRE's critical infrastructure business saw a revenue jump of 80% year-over-year, largely driven by demand for data center solutions and its $1.2B acquisition of data center and infrastructure sector service provider Pearce Services last year. Infrastructure services revenue was up 50% to $4.5B on a trailing 12-month basis.

"Of course we're seeing pressure on our real estate capital markets business, but that is being offset in a big way by outsized growth in our resilient business, notably infrastructure services and data centers," CBRE Chief Financial and Investment Officer Emma Giamartino said.

CBRE's stock was down 3.5% as of early Thursday afternoon, compared to the S&P 500, which dipped 1.3%.

The world's largest commercial real estate firm maintained its 2026 earnings-per-share guidance of $7.80 to $7.90, which it raised in the second quarter.

The growth comes amid market volatility and uncertainty driven by the first Federal Reserve rate hike since 2023 in mid-September, which has placed mounting pressure on investment sales and management, mortgage origination and development, Sulentic said.

"Part of what's going on here isn't just the interest rate situation and what interest rates are, but the uncertainty around interest rates," he said. "It's our view that that could settle out in the back half of next year and be helpful. Of course, none of us know what's going to happen as a result."

The company expects revenue in its advisory services and building operations and experience segments to miss their projections of 20% and 25% growth, respectively, due to "increased pressure on capital markets from higher interest rates" and "lower expectations for enterprise facilities management," according to the third-quarter earnings presentation.

In the BOE segment in particular, Sulentic said "problematic" accounts that CBRE is in the process of reviewing and resolving could put downward pressure on earnings in the fourth quarter.

There are two specific deals that CBRE is restructuring due to not being able to deliver on contracted services because "it doesn't work the way it's structured now," Sulentic said.

"We are going to learn from it and change some things going forward, but it's the thing to know about those contracts relative to the local business," Sulentic said. "Those are very big, very complex contracts."

Even though there are growing concerns about an artificial intelligence bubble jeopardizing the profitability of the data center boom, CBRE expects its business in the sector to keep growing.

CBRE projects revenue from total infrastructure services — including overseeing construction of transportation and energy assets as well as project management and arranging the sale, leasing and financing of data centers — to reach nearly $7B in 2027, Sulentic said on the call. That would be a more than 40% jump from 2026.

A large driver of projected revenue comes from CBRE's planned acquisition of data center infrastructure provider Onnec Group Ltd., which is expected to close by the end of this year.

The London-based company, which installs and services data center equipment for technology companies in Europe and Asia, provides CBRE with a global cushion.

"If things slow down here for data centers in the U.S., either because of the interest rate environment or because of the political environment, etc., we think the growth is going to accelerate outside the U.S., and Onnec puts us in a great position to take care of that," Sulentic said. "We think that in data centers, you're going to see potentially some pressure on the amount of new build, which is crazy right now."

CBRE is projecting to grow earnings by 15% next year, a number that executives said is derived partly from planned acquisitions, specifically in the data center space, in the U.S. and around the world.

"There is a lot of room to go in terms of the magnitude of our business around the world," Sulentic said. "This is a super fragmented business. We've now become very large relative to most players in this segment, but still very small relative to the size of the opportunity."