Cushman & Wakefield plc

Good day, and welcome to the Cushman and Wakefield First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Megan McGrath, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome to Cushman & Wakefield's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Earlier today, we issued a press release announcing our financial results for the period. This release, along with today's presentation, can be found on our Investor Relations website at ir.cushmanwakefield.com. Please turn to the page in our presentation labeled Cautionary Notes on Forward-Looking Statements. Today's presentation contains forward-looking statements based on our current forecast and estimates of future events. These statements should be considered estimates only, and actual results may differ materially. During today's call, we will refer to non-GAAP financial measures as outlined by SEC guidelines. reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures, definitions of non-GAAP financial measures, and other related information are found within the financial tables of our earnings release and the appendix of today's presentation. Also, please note that throughout the presentation, comparisons and growth rates are to the comparable periods of 2023 and in local currency unless otherwise stated. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, Michelle McKay. Thank you, Megan.

In 2023, we spoke with you frequently about positioning ourselves in a thoughtful way for the recovery. And as you can see from our performance, the actions that we took in support of these words created strong first quarter results. Since the last time that we spoke, our teams have seized market opportunities and we continue to strengthen our balance sheet, including our first optional prepayment of debt, as well as successfully repricing our 2030 term loan, reducing our annual cash interest costs. We reported another quarter of global leasing growth and saw meaningful improvements in capital markets. We've had a couple of key wins in our services businesses in the last month alone as we continue to step away from less accretive services transactions. And importantly, we achieved these results while maintaining cost discipline, leading to an improvement of more than 100 basis points and adjusted EBITDA margin. Looking at the big picture, the year is generally progressing in line with expectations. On our last earnings call, I said that we were expecting a moderate initial reduction in rates sometime later in the year. Our view from the onset has been that the Fed was likely to remain cautious this year, and our strategy and budgeting decisions were made in accordance with that view. Our outlook and optimism for the recovery are strong, and we continue to position our business in a thoughtful way for this next stage in the cycle. Given the recent increase in rate volatility, I'd like to take a couple minutes to share our thoughts on how we view the relationship between the Fed rate cuts and our business. Because overall, we view the Fed rate cuts as an accelerator of certain parts of the business, but not the only avenue for transactional improvements. Our first quarter results provide some insights into these dynamics, illustrating what occurs when there is rate stability, economic optimism, a solid pipeline of deals, and strong teams armed with a clearly defined strategy. We expect that leasing, which is a particular strength of ours, will continue to benefit from global economic resiliency as we move through the cycle and our diverse platform allows us to capture pockets of strength across regions and asset classes, as we have positioned ourselves to do for the past several quarters. During the quarter, we saw continued solid growth in leasing across our global platform, with revenues up 5% for the second quarter in a row. And on the capital market side of the business, activity in Q1 reflected transactions closing in the early part of the quarter, when there was more optimism over a potential first rate cut from the Fed. Although the recent uptick in rate volatility will most likely cause a pause in transaction volumes in Q2, the improvement that we experienced in Q1 gives us more confidence that global investment sales pipelines are solid and investors are ready to engage when the time is right. I'm pleased with our first quarter performance and the way in which our teams continue to execute and find opportunities across our segments and geographies. The clarity that the reset strategy has given management is already paying dividends in a more cohesive and connected approach to the way that we are operating the company and interacting with our clients. With that, I'll turn the call over to Neil.