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spk05: any future results, performance, or achievements contemplated in the forward-looking statements. Additionally, information concerning factors that could cause actual results to materially differ from those in the forward-looking statements is contained in the company's annual information form as filed with the Canadian Security Administrators and in the company's annual report on Form 40-F. as filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. Today is November the 2nd, 2023. And at this time, for open remarks and instructions, I would like to turn the call over to Global Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Jay Hennick. Please go ahead, sir.
spk09: Thank you, operator. Good morning and welcome to our third quarter conference call. As the operator mentioned, I'm Jay Hennick. And joining me today is Chris McLaren, Chief Executive Officer of our Real Estate Services business, and Christian Mayer, our Chief Financial Officer. This call is being webcast and can be accessed in our investor relations section of our website, where you can find a presentation slide deck. During the third quarter, Collier's achieved significant growth in our high-value recurring service lines, with a 12% increase in outsourcing and advisering, outsourcing and advisory, and a robust 23% increase in investment management. Our proven business model marked by a diverse array of high-value recurring services has continued to demonstrate our resilience. Today, about 70% of our earnings come from recurring revenues, which bolsters our ability to navigate through various market fluctuations, including the current disruptions affecting our transactional business. Since the release of our second quarter report back in August, we've seen further industry-wide declines in transaction volumes due to ongoing factors such as rising interest rates, stricter credit conditions, and continued uncertainty around return-to-work dynamics. As a result, we've adjusted our outlook for the traditionally strongest fourth quarter to be more conservative in our stance, as Christian will outline in just a few minutes. As I've said in the past, capital markets and leasing are essential services for all real estate investors, owners and occupiers or tenants. They may be impacted from time to time as they are now, but they will rebound once things stabilize, which could be as early as the second half of 2024. Several years ago, Colliers embarked on a strategic journey to rebalance and reposition our company by integrating more recurring revenue streams. We introduced two important new growth engines, engineering and design, and investment management, both of which have seen substantial growth and success since inception, and we expect that success to continue well into the future. Our nearly 30-year track record of performance demonstrates our success and dedication to continuing to create substantial shareholder value. And we'll do that by continuing to grow our businesses one step at a time, expanding into new high-value recurring services, and continually seeking out strategic growth opportunities, especially in times like these. Now, let me turn things over to Chris McLaren to discuss some highlights. Following that, Christian will provide us with his customary financial report, and then we'll open things up to questions. Chris?
spk04: Thank you, Jay, and good morning. Our mission at Coyers is to maximize the potential of property and real assets to accelerate the success of our clients and our people while creating value for our shareholders. Today, Colliers remains resilient, benefiting from our years of strengthening our core business while adding fast-growing recurring service lines. In outsourcing and advisor, we achieved an impressive 12% year-over-year growth, 50% of which came internally through new contract wins. We expect this growth to continue in engineering design, project management, and property management. As mentioned, we have seen further declines in capital markets in Q3, due to interest rate volatility, limited access to debt, and the continued price gap between buyers and sellers of real estate assets. We are confident that capital markets will rebound, perhaps in the second half of 2024, and we are poised to take advantage once market conditions stabilize. Over the past few years, we've accelerated our investments in capital markets platform to grow our business, fill gaps, and take market shares. For example, in the U.S., we have built a significant debt advisory business at Collier's Mortgage. Today, our platform spans the entire U.S. with more than 150 experienced debt professionals to assist our clients originate and place real estate debt at just the right time. Once again, our expertise and ability to deliver exceptional results for property occupiers, owners, and investors as recognized by Euromoney, Colliers was named Global Agency of the Year across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, which is a testament to our strong and growing position in the industry. Our professionals around the world continue to be enterprising, especially in the current market environment. Our latest Global Employee Engagement Survey saw our strongest scores ever, nicely exceeding external benchmarks. Our strong culture was also recently recognized by our inclusion in Forbes, World's Best Employers 2023 List. Now let me pass this over to Christian.
spk10: Thank you, Chris, and good morning, everyone. I will provide some additional commentary on our consolidated results, our financial outlook for the full year, and our balance sheet. Please note that all references to revenue growth made on this call are expressed in local currency, and that the non-GAAP measures discussed here today are as defined in the materials accompanying this call. In the third quarter, revenues were $1.1 billion, down 6% relative to the comparative prior year quarter. Our capital markets and leasing service lines reported revenue declines of 42% and 9%, respectively, continuing the trends that started during the third quarter of last year. Having said that, our recurring service lines, investment management and outsourcing and advisory, each reported robust growth from a combination of acquisitions and strong internal growth. On an overall basis, internal revenues declined 10%. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $145 million, flat relative to the prior year, with margins 13.7% versus 13.1% in the prior year quarter. The margin uptick was driven by growth in our higher margin investment management operations with margin compression and our transaction business partially offset by ongoing aggressive cost control actions across the company. We achieved cost savings of $25 million during the third quarter and $53 million year to date. We expect an additional roughly $30 million of cost savings in the fourth quarter. We are preparing to extend our cost control efforts into 2024 to match the duration of the expected transactional revenue downturn. We have revised our financial outlook for 2023 to reflect the declines in transaction velocity that occurred in the third quarter and the more challenging current market environment. We expect capital markets and leasing transaction volumes to be down 5% to 15% in the seasonally strongest fourth quarter relative to the prior year period. with the impact partly offset by ongoing cost control efforts. In our recurring service lines, we are expecting to see continued growth, both internally as well as from recent smaller tuck-in acquisitions. In investment management, fundraising year to date has been softer than expected, and that trend continued in the third quarter. For the full year, we now expect fundraising to be approximately $3 billion, compared to $8 billion raised in 2022. We do, however, continue to see strong interest in our alternative investing strategies, which should translate into accelerated fundraising in 2024. Implied in our full-year outlook is the expectation that fourth quarter EBITDA will be roughly flat versus the prior year quarter. Although we had previously expected EBITDA to increase in the fourth quarter, a flat result will demonstrate the resilience of our recurring revenue streams and the highly variable nature of the cost structure in our transactional operations given current market conditions. Our adjusted earnings per share is expected to continue being impacted by higher interest expense as well as the larger proportion of earnings coming from non-holy owned operations. As such, we now expect full-year adjusted earnings per share to be down from last year to the range of $5.10 to $5.50. In terms of our balance sheet, our financial leverage ratio defined as net debt to perform an adjusted EBITDA was 2.4 times at September 30th, consistent with the level reported at June 30th, and driven by capital deployed on acquisitions over the past two years. These acquisitions are predominantly in recurring service lines and are performing well. We now expect our leverage to decline to 2 to 2.2 times by year end. That concludes my prepared remarks. I would now like to open the call for questions. Operator, can you please open the line?
spk05: Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please dial star one on your telephone keypads now to enter the queue. Once your name is announced, you can ask your question. If you find your question is answered before it's your turn to speak, you can dial star two to cancel. So once again, that's star one to ask a question or star two if you need to cancel. Our first question comes from the line of Michael Dunmuth of Scotiabank. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
spk02: Michael Dunmuth, Scotiabank, Hey, good morning, guys. The first question I had was really just as it relates to the slowing leasing activity. Just wondering if you can break that down in terms of end markets and how that's evolved in the last 12 months. Just wondering if you see incremental weakness in industrial, and if so, what that means for the cadence into 2024.
spk04: Yeah, Michael, it's Chris here. Just some commentary. There are some bright spots throughout the global platform. If you look at leasing in our Asia Pacific region, we were up 9.5% year over year. And that relates across the board. We had some strong leasing in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, in India, and that would predominantly be in office and industrial. Another bright spot would have been Canada. We had a 52% increase in leasing. So there is some leasing taking place. On the negative side, you'd see we've always been quite strong in industrial leasing around the world, and it's the lack of supply. You're looking at 3% to 4% vacancy, so it's hard to get some transactions there. Um, so I think we're seeing, you know, looking forward, um, you know, some continued growth in, in leasing in Asia Pacific, um, and the recovery in Americas and EMEA may be a little bit slower.
spk02: That's great. Thank you. Uh, just going back to the Q4 expectation, um, for flat, flattish EBITDA. Um, Christian, just wondering if you can maybe break that down a little bit again. So you're expecting, uh, capital markets leasing to be down between five and 15%. Presumably ONAs is rising there, just not sure on the quantum if you can talk about that. And then lastly on investment management for Q4.
spk10: Yeah, thanks, Michael. For in terms of ONA, we do expect organic growth in Q4. That's going to continue and we've been running in the mid to high single-digit organic growth there this year and that's going to continue. And in terms of investment management, We have a nice cadence of management fee revenue that is in the EBITDA and Q3. That's going to continue, and we do expect a little bit of fundraising in the fourth quarter as well. It'll be additive to EBITDA in the investment management segment.
spk11: Perfect. Those are my two. Thank you.
spk05: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Stephen Sheldon at William Blair. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
spk12: Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. First one here, just on, if you think about 2024 adjusted EBITDA, can you help us think about how much benefit you might have in terms of incremental flow through from cost actions taken so far? And I guess the planned reduction that you talked about for 4Q, which I think was 30 million, if I heard that correctly. How much of an incremental boost could that be as we think about bridging 2024 adjusted EBITDA back to 2023?
spk10: Yeah, Steven, thanks for that question. You know, we certainly expect to be able to continue and sustain the level of cost actions we've taken to date. So that was our, you know, that's kind of our operating assumption into 2024. It may be difficult to increase the level of cost action, but that's something we will, you know, consider the next month and have detailed, you know, reviews with our operators locally and regionally.
spk11: Okay.
spk12: I guess just if we think about the $52 million year-to-date cost-cutting number, you know, is that kind of – are you reaching that full run rate in 2023? Or, you know, I would assume there would be some flow-through transactions into 2023.
spk10: Yeah, that's right.
spk12: Based into 2023 and how much of this would flow through into 2024.
spk10: Exactly. So we have reached our run rate at this point. And, you know, 25 to 30 million a quarter is the run rate. And those actions took effect, you know, in Q2 of this year. So they are now fully in effect and they will continue until we see a meaningful recovery in the transaction business.
spk11: Okay.
spk12: And then just on the IM side, I just kind of want to ask how we should think about modeling AUM in the fourth quarter. I think you've kind of mentioned maybe that there would be a step up given the fundraising activity. So kind of how should we think about 4Q? What are you seeing that gives you confidence about fundraising activity maybe picking back up next year?
spk09: Let me let me talk. Let me let Christian talk about the fourth quarter and how he's seeing the fourth quarter. But, you know, fundraising across the board with absolutely every publicly traded firm that reports their fundraising has been has been tough, regardless of asset class, which has been interesting. Of course, traditional real estate's been hit the most. but alternate asset classes and infrastructure like we have has done much better but still soft what's been interesting is there is a lot of uh interest in in our funds and i believe other other funds that are in the market that are similar to our types of funds but there's been just just been a delay that's impacted us. So if we look at our pipelines relative to last year, they're up materially. Whether we can convert them towards the end of the year or most probably mostly into the first part of 2024 is still a question to be answered. But the results of our investment management professionals have been stellar relative to others in their industry. They're in the market actively with several different strategies. So that puts us in the game. And we're cautiously optimistic that 2024 will be a very strong year for fundraising.
spk10: um you know my guess is it'll do better than we did last year in overall fundraising but uh we still have to wait to see and steven on turn of the fourth quarter um we do expect uh some fundraising it will be modest and as i outlined in my comments um you know the fundraising this year is significantly less than it was in 2022 And so I would expect our AUM will be, you know, roughly flat, perhaps up a little bit in the fourth quarter. Some positive benefit from fundraising and also some ongoing activity in terms of mark to market, which we've been experiencing now over the last year. You know, modest mark to market on our traditional real estate assets primarily. So, you know, hopefully that's helpful.
spk11: Very helpful. Thank you.
spk05: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Stephen McLeod at BMO Capital. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
spk07: Great. Thank you. Good morning, guys. Appreciate the color. Just a couple of follow-up questions just relating to your commentary around the potential transaction activity picking up in the back half of next year. I'm just curious. sort of how you could characterize your visibility into that? I mean, is that something that, you know, that you're hearing from your clients because they have demand pent up or is it more just a reflection of the macro backdrop and the rates backdrop? Just curious if you give a little bit of color there.
spk09: It's a great question, Stephen, because, you know, just 90 days ago, We gave you our best guess of, and probably it's not best guess, it's best information across the world on how we would be doing had market conditions remained as they were 90 days ago. And since then, we've seen substantial increases in interest rates. Everybody in the world is reading about lack of availability of credit. and tougher credit conditions across the board. There is a lot of money in the private marketplace and being raised in private debt collection right now, not yet implemented. And all of those things are having an impact on transactions. And so, to me, this is just common to anybody that follows the industry. when you have substantially rising interest rates, when it's very difficult to get debt, when you're looking at your existing portfolio and you're saying, I've got existing debt coming due in 12 months or 18 months, and the interest rates are going to go up materially. My covenants are going to be offside. Everybody in the industry is pausing. Everybody. Now, there's There's transactions that are happening on some trophy assets here or there. Banks are supporting their better customers, but they're supporting them at substantially higher interest rates, at low loan-to-value ratios. So when we think back to 90 days ago and see the drastic change, you've got to absolutely reflect on where is this going to go for the fourth quarter, which we're taking a much more conservative stance, as I said. But the reality is, my view, and you're asking me for my view, my view is unless there's stability in the marketplace around interest rates, one, unless we see lenders in the marketplace, providing debt at the same types of ratios as they did historically and finally sellers being more risk realistic about uh their their their price expectations this is going to delay and that's why we say it's likely to be beyond the first half. Earlier in the year, we were expecting the fourth quarter to be quite strong, actually, because we were expecting there to be some stability in interest rates. I don't think anybody anywhere in the industry anticipated the strict lending conditions and how they've evolved during the course of the year. All of this to say, we remain unclear as to when that's going to change. But when it does, it's going to be a massive change, and it's going to happen, I think, relatively. It's going to be slow at first, but then it'll take on a velocity because there's lots of dry powder in the marketplace. Banks have to lend in order to make money. And there is a lot of people in the real estate sector. It's the biggest sector out there. So as Chris McLaren said earlier, we have for the past couple of years in our core business alone, forget all the work we've done around recurring revenue and how that's transformed Collier's into a different type of diversified services business and asset management business. We've invested heavily in our core business and we're ready, willing, and able to help clients not only buy and sell, but most importantly, finance, not most importantly, but as importantly, finance those transactions. We just need normalization to happen. So as operators in this business, it's our job to keep our heads straight uh focused on what's important and that is to have strong financial wherewithal to capitalize on transactions to continue to invest in your platform uh to call out costs in times like these that you can call out without having an impact necessarily on on the uh the strength of the business going forward so we're doing all of those things And we believe that it's going to translate into significant shareholder value at some point in the future. Just don't know when it is the end of the end of, um, at the middle of, uh, middle of next year towards the end of next year. Don't know.
spk07: That's a great color, Jay. Thank you. Thank you for that. Um, and then I just wanted to follow up because I think it's important. You mentioned, um, you know, and obviously the recurring revenue business continues to hold in quite well, which is, uh, significant piece of your evolution. Can you just talk a little bit about if you have any incremental color around the areas of relative strength and weakness within the O&A business and how you see those potentially evolving going forward as well?
spk09: You know, the beauty of our O&A business is that it is very stable. We've been very, and Chris might want to talk to this a little bit, property management for us has grown materially around the world. And it's been, frankly, a surprise, I think, to us in some respects. And so that's been a very positive sign. Project management continues to be very strong, and our project management is representing owners in major construction projects, and that piece of our business continues to be very strong. They're long-dated retainers, sometimes five and seven years between a project beginning from estimate to completion. So we're seeing those businesses grow considerably. Chris, is there any other areas that have been a surprise to you as you look across the board?
spk04: So I think what's great is that in each region, the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific, ONA is up year over year growth. So it's balanced across the world. You know, some of the bright spots, you know, Jay mentioned property management. You know, we've grown in... in the US. And this is new clients or expanding clients portfolios. And it's nice to see, you know, the growth in LA, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, some of those bigger centers in the in the US. But also, you know, you're looking at the UK, Netherlands, Finland, Poland, you know, expanding property management. So it's quite exciting there. You know, the second pillar of project management, we've got a fantastic business in India that is going all guns is obviously there's Strong GDP growth in India. We're taking advantage of that. We invested at the right time. So we're seeing some real significant growth there. You know, the acquisitions in Australia, New Zealand and engineering and project management are now, you know, fully integrated into the Collier's business. And we're seeing synergies on the revenue side and the cost side. So, you know, there's quite exciting, you know, in the O&A space on a global basis.
spk11: Great. Thank you so much for that, Collar.
spk05: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Frederick Bastian of Raymond James. Please go ahead. Your line is up.
spk06: Hey, good morning. Question is for Jay or Chris. Obviously, it's a tough slug on the capital market side, but if you take a step back and do a bit of a health check on your brokerage business, what are the things that excite you most? You did cite great employee engagement scores earlier, but are there other things that you'd like to highlight?
spk11: I'll jump in, Chris.
spk09: You can jump in if you want. I mean, one of the things that Chris mentioned in his prepared remarks is the entire Collier's Mortgage business over the past several years We have created a national platform, which Collier's never had before, where we're ready, willing, and able and busy providing debt advisory advice and restructuring advice to our clients everywhere. This is particularly needed in times like this. It doesn't necessarily translate into transactions immediately. But clients, this team of professionals, and I think it's up to 150 now, they are busier than ever working with clients on existing portfolios and loans that are coming due. And they need help in not only re-envisioning their portfolios, but finding new financing sources. so um and and we do this in other parts of the world but i think collier's mortgage has really set the standard and that we're excited about what that could mean uh for the uh u.s business or the north american business uh going forward thanks jay um i think if i look at the overall brokerage business you know one of the the key highlights to our success is our strong culture that people really enjoy working at colliers and
spk04: We have a lot of long tenure within the business. We've also worked a lot on retention. So we have a high retention rate of our key producers throughout the world. And we're positioned quite strongly for when that recovery comes. One of the exciting things is in the US, we continue our recruiting and we're ahead of plan in 2023 and that's succeeding our recruiting targets in the year before. Lots of excitement in the brokerage business about strengthening our team, keeping our team in place, and getting ready for that recovery.
spk06: That's helpful. Thank you. Next one's for Christian. I think you partly answered this, saying the fundraising. You expected roughly $3 billion in fundraising for the full year. Is that all back-end loaded, or did some of this already get kind of... recorded in year-to-date results.
spk10: Yeah, Frederick, we've got about $2 million year-to-date fundraising already completed. So we're expecting $800 million or $900 million in the fourth quarter. So some activity, but like I said, modest. And we have pretty high visibility on that at this point. And we're obviously gearing up for a return to more normal fundraising activity in 2024 with the products we have in the market.
spk06: come from a mix of alternative assets and infrastructure? The fundraising? You bet. Exactly.
spk10: Yeah.
spk06: And then obviously, it might explain the modest sequential increase we saw in AUM this quarter. I think you had an increase of, what is it, $8.8 billion?
spk11: Our AUM is pretty flat this quarter. Okay.
spk06: All right. Thanks.
spk11: Thank you.
spk05: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jimmy Shawn at RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
spk01: Thank you. So just a follow-up on the capital markets business. Yeah, timing of the recovery is hard to predict, but how should we think about the level at which the revenue, when it does recover, the level at which it normalizes that? Because on the one hand, it sounds like there's a lot of operating leverage in the business. But on the other hand, asset values are down to presumably lower fees on a proportionate basis. So if 2022 was a billion of revenue, do you think you could get back to that level at some point?
spk10: So I'll start on that one, Jimmy, and maybe Chris can add to it. We have been adding productive capacity to our brokerage business over the last few years. So we have a strong team of professionals on the ground that is positioned to participate in the recovery. And we talked about when that happens. Not exactly sure when that happens, but it will happen. So we're well positioned on that front. Now, you make a good point about asset values. And it's really impacting office only, which is about a third of our sales activity. So that will have a modest impact perhaps on our commission levels. That being said, as assets are more difficult to sell, the commission rates tend to increase. So that's a bit of an offset to that. So I think the recovery will be strong. Our position in the market has gotten stronger. our number of producers and our productivity has increased. So I think we're well positioned for the recovery.
spk04: And just to add some color, three years ago, we as a senior management team identified capital markets as an area of significant growth. And we looked at where our gaps were. So we've been doing recruiting of senior professionals and also doing acquisitions. We're poised to really, you know, get back to where we were in terms of revenues and exceed that, you know, as we take market share going forward.
spk09: You know, and the last thing I would add just for additional color, you know, my take on asset values is maybe different than most. Industrial continues to be very strong, and Chris already mentioned that there is a shortage of industrial space around the world. So not only are rates going up, but the valuations of those properties are going up. Multifamily continues to be good. Retail has rebounded very nicely. So the only category that I think there is price adjustment coming is in office, and not all office. It's only probably tier two B, B plus office, suburban office, where valuations will fall. And the beauty of our business is we're a service business. We don't own those assets. We just trade those assets. And that's one of the great things about having a... a high cash flow generating low cap X type business. And as Christian said, the tougher the asset to sell, the higher the fee we typically get. So I don't think valuations of real estate will have any impact on us. And at the end of the day, we'll see what happens. And just to circle again what Chris said, Our numbers of real estate professionals are up. The number of debt professionals we have is up materially over the past three years, so that creates additional revenue streams. So all of that, together with an overall relative stabilization in real estate values, will and should continue to translate into a very solid rebound for Collier's and to the point where we'll do better in the future than we have in the past in our view.
spk01: Okay, no, I appreciate the color. And then my second question is on the investment management side. Can you give us a sense of how big that pipeline is in terms of the funds that you have on the market today?
spk09: You never know. You never know if you can, you know, I'll show you the pipeline. You tell me who's going to, who's going to subscribe, who isn't going to subscribe, when. It's always we wait it. We have a very detailed process around assessing our potential for fundraising. But our overall pipeline in every category of certainty of close is up materially. We think it's up across the board and should translate into a substantial additional fundraising as we go forward.
spk11: Okay. Thank you.
spk05: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Rozovac at Wolf Research. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
spk08: Good morning, Tim. Thanks for taking my question. I was going to go again with one more asset management question. You guys have kind of hit it a lot in different pieces. If I put some numbers around it, your AUM September 30 was down 1% sequentially, up 14 year over year. If we were going to kind of decompose that between redemptions and marks, or maybe even funds that you've purchased? Is there any way we could kind of break down what's driving that?
spk10: Yeah, Andrew, that's a great question. I don't have year-over-year numbers in front of me, but I do have year-to-date numbers, which I think illustrate the point. So as I mentioned, we've raised just around $2 billion of new capital this year. We've had modest redemptions that are a small fraction of that. like I'm talking like $500 million or less. And our mark-to-market activity has been around 2%, which is about $2 billion as well in the portfolio. And those are really the drivers of it. And as I mentioned, the mark-to-market is on the traditional assets primarily. And that has been happening through the last year and may continue modestly here in the fourth quarter. so minus that means you can continue to see increases in the uh in the valuation despite kind of the challenges that we're seeing yeah i mean look we can't predict we can't predict the uh you know the the future of of the valuations but it's certainly um possible that we will have further mark to market uh negative adjustments uh in the coming one or two quarters um you know as interest rate volatility uh continues I should point out, though, that most of our portfolio is in closed-end funds, which does not get impacted by mark-to-market activity in terms of the management fee revenue. So it's only a third of our portfolio that has mark-to-market activity, and even in that part, only a small amount of traditional real estate assets. So it's not a big driver of our fee revenue in terms of considering mark-to-market activity.
spk09: Most of what Christian is talking about is in infrastructure and alternate asset classes, which the marks have been modest, extremely modest, almost non-existent because they're wonderful assets and they're valued over a long period of time. So we don't really see much there. Right.
spk10: And we haven't even felt it over the past 12 months. Yeah, the marked market is not something that's driving our management fee revenue. The driver is fundraising. And we've talked about that quite a bit.
spk08: And one other thing, just so we get this right, your $3 billion of fundraising this year, would that all be fee paying?
spk05: uh yes because that's the equity component of the uh yeah that's right got it all right thanks a lot guys thank you and we currently have one further question in the queue so just as a reminder to participants if you do wish to ask a question please dial star one on your telephone keypads now and that next question comes from the line of Maxim Sychev of National Bank Financial please go ahead to your line
spk11: Hi, good morning, gentlemen.
spk03: Jack, or maybe Christian, wondering if maybe you can comment around the market share dynamics in capital markets and leasing, because when we look at how you guys performed during the financial crisis, I mean, it was much better versus peers. And even right now, kind of the levels of declines are less. So do you mind maybe if you have some data points that you can point to on that front that would be helpful? Thank you.
spk04: Yeah, I think, you know, the data we have from RCA has the market down 51% and we're down 42%. So I think there's, you know, some market share gain. That's the data point that I have handy.
spk09: Yeah, I think if you look across the board at, virtually all of the peers that have reported so far, we're either at or better than every single one of those peers in virtually every category. So, you know, I would say in each case, we're picking up market share all the way along. And a lot of that has to do with what Chris said. You know, our culture is very strong. Our retention rates are are exceptionally strong. We've been recruiting nicely over the past number of years. We've built significant platforms within our core services business in addition to engineering and design and investment management. We continue one step at a time to invest in our core platform, which is getting stronger. It's global, so there's global growth opportunities. You know, we're feeling very good about our business and its future, and we believe that we're picking up market share virtually everywhere.
spk03: Excellent. Thank you so much for that. And just one follow-up question. I guess, Jay, as you spend time with sort of capital allocators, and, you know, like everybody's trying to figure out what is kind of, you know, the trigger for certain things to start normalizing, because when you're expectation of sort of a rebound during Q2 commentary, I think that the long-term rate was around kind of 3.5%. Do you think that's kind of the level where the 10-year in the U.S. has to go to in order to sort of see catalyst for activity to get going? What is your sense from that perspective? And again, I appreciate it's a super cool dynamic obviously.
spk09: Thanks. Frankly, I don't care. I really don't care. It can be pick your rate. Everybody's got an opinion. We just need stability. In our business, we just need stability and we need availability of debt and the market will look after itself. The buyers and sellers will come together and they will make transactions because they either have to or they want to or they've got dry powder. So the problem that we've all had in this industry, and by the way, it's leaked out into the entire marketplace. The availability of capital has impacted the ability to make acquisitions. It's impacted the earnings per share of every company out there that borrows money. So this is a... This is a market that is impacting everybody. But I think in real estate, it's such a massive market. And as soon as there's stability, you'll see activity. And that's all we really focus on.
spk11: Excellent. Very helpful. Thank you so much.
spk05: Thank you. And there are no further questions in the queue at this time, so I'll hand the floor back to Mr. Hennick for the closing comments.
spk09: Thanks very much, Operator. Thanks, everyone, for joining us on this conference call. Let's see how we do in the fourth quarter. And we've given you our best information at this point. Hopefully, we'll be able to do a little bit better than that, but we'll see how things transpire. So looking forward to speaking at the next conference call. Thanks for joining us today.
spk05: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the conference call. Thank you for your participation and have a nice day.
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