CBRE Group, Inc. (NYSE:CBRE) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Emma Giamartino: So office leasing this year has been performing in-line with our expectations. There has been some we noted some drop-off in the larger office deals, but we were anticipating decline a mid-15% decline across office leasing. On the industrial side, that is – industrial leasing is performing slightly below expectations. But as Bob alluded to, that is primarily driven by the largest industrial transactions and the largest occupiers of industrial space who took on a lot of space over the past couple of years and are resetting. We don’t expect that to be a continued trend going into next year. And in terms of mix, I think our leasing has grown. Industrial has grown as a percentage of our overall leasing and offices declined, but that isn’t out of what we were expecting going into the year and into the quarter.

Stephen Sheldon: Okay. Great, thank you. And then just on capital, if I – it sounds like you’re ramping investments into IM in development. So can you give more detail on the opportunities you’re seeing there and why this could be the right time to make those investments?

Bob Sulentic: Well, this – what typically happens in an environment like this and what is definitively happening now on the development side, where the investments we make are largely acquiring land for future development. Landholders often landholders that bought that land to develop it, you can’t develop it because they can’t get the capital to develop it or they don’t have the capital themselves to make the co-investment needed to develop it. And so good land sites that otherwise wouldn’t have been available become available. And because of our position in two ways, our balance sheet, plus the stable of really strong developers we have in local markets. We identify opportunities of this nature. We’re in the market all the time, up and down cycles.

We know the land sites that are good. We know the land sites that we would have liked to have gotten that we didn’t get. And what we do is we go back because we now have the capital to take those land sites down, we go back and try to secure some of those sites. And cycle after cycle, what you see is that it’s the acquisition of those land sites and the development deals that result from those land sites that become your best profit deals. And as Emma said earlier, we’re focused on multifamily and industrial there. On the investment management side, we think this is a good point in the cycle to look at value add and opportunistic. So, we have an opportunistic fund run out of the UK that’s got a very, very strong track record that we have made a significant commitment to with our own balance sheet to raise the next fund to do investments in real estate secondaries and we are very excited about that opportunity.

And then we have three value-add businesses, one in each region of the world U.S., EMEA and Asia Pacific, all of which were providing co-investment to do our next fund in, all of which we see lots of opportunity in. So, that’s our co-investment strategy. That’s what – when we talk about $370 million year-to-date, that’s where we have invested. And we are well positioned to continue to invest.

Stephen Sheldon: Very helpful. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Patrick O’Shaughnessy with Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy: Hey. Good morning. What are you hearing from asset owners in terms of allocating capital towards commercial real estate in a higher interest rate world as opposed to allocating capital towards asset classes would perceive lower risk?