Several of the world's biggest commercial real estate brokerages were swept up in a stock sell-off described as the result of artificial intelligence-related fears that have made the rounds on Wall Street lately.
Shares of Cushman & Wakefield were down 14%, and Newmark was down about 13.4% at market close, Bloomberg reported. CBRE Group and JLL dropped 12%, while Colliers fell a little more than 11%.
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For CBRE and Cushman, the drops marked the biggest since 2020, Bloomberg reported.
JLL, CBRE and Cushman are not only among the largest companies in CRE but also the firms that have leaned most heavily on their own internal AI platforms — JLL with Falcon, CBRE with Ellis and Cushman with AI+.
Analysts remained largely cool despite the one-day change-up.
"AI fears have cycled through various industries recently, including software and insurance, so it wouldn't be surprising if in fact these same concerns drove the brokers' selloff," Piper Sandler Managing Director Alexander Goldfarb wrote in a Wednesday note to investors.
Goldfarb's note focused especially on Newmark, and his bullish position on the firm was unchanged after the sell-off.
"The lack of supply, REITs trading at discounts, 2021 aggressively underwritten apartments deals, stable 10-year, compressing spreads, growing demand, [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act], and fund managers who have money burning a hole in their pockets all conspire to paint 2026 as a robust transaction market," Goldfarb wrote.
"There are many reasons why NMRK's multipronged business model should thrive."
Attempts to understand the fears for CRE boiled down to investors trying to swap out "high-fee, labor-intensive business models viewed as potentially vulnerable to AI-driven disruption," Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analyst Jade Rahmani wrote in a note to his clients Wednesday.
Rahmani also wrote that the sell-off "may overstate the immediate risk to complex deal-making, even as the long-term AI impact remains a 'wait-and-see.'"
But investors aren't waiting. Within the last week, an "AI scare trade" blew through the markets, with investors quickly dumping "shares of software firms, private credit companies, wealth managers and insurance brokers," according to Bloomberg.
The publication drew a line between the flurry to sell and AI startup Anthropic's release of some new tools aimed at automating tasks in a broad swath of white-collar service sectors, from legal services to financial research.
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