CBRE Group Inc

Hello and welcome to the CBRE Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. You may be placed into question queue at any time by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Brad Burke, Head of Investor Relations and Treasurer. Brad, please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to CBRE's fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Earlier today, we posted a presentation deck on our website that you can use to follow along with our prepared remarks and an Excel file that contains additional supplemental materials. Before we kick off today's call, I'll remind you that today's presentation contains forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements concerning our economic outlook, our business plans and capital allocation strategy, and our financial outlook. Forward-looking statements are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results and trends to differ materially from those projected. For a full discussion of the risks and other factors that may impact these forward-looking statements, please refer to this morning's earnings release and our SEC filings. We have provided reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures discussed on our call to the most directly comparable GAAP measures together with explanations of these measures in our presentation deck appendix. I'm joined on today's call by Bob Cilentic, our chair and CEO, and Emma Giammartino, our chief financial officer. Now, please turn to slide five as I turn the call over to Bob.

Thank you, Brad, and good morning, everyone. CBRE ended 2023 on a high note with fourth quarter year-over-year operating profit growth across all three of our business segments. Even though 2023 was a difficult year for commercial real estate, we delivered the third highest full year earnings in CBRE's history as our resilient businesses continued their strong growth. This partly offset market-driven revenue declines in businesses that are sensitive to interest rates and debt availability. Emma will talk about our resilient businesses in greater detail at the beginning of her comments. We are committed to driving significant gains in all of our businesses with a particular focus on through cycle resiliency and double digit compound long term earnings growth. Two recent wins highlight our progress. First, with the acquisition of J&J Worldwide Services in our GWS segment, we will increase our technical services capabilities for US federal government clients and open a mostly untapped channel in a difficult to penetrate market. This is a large market characterized by steady growth and long-term contracts. Second, our strategic partnership provide property management services for Brookfield Properties' 65 million square foot U.S. office portfolio is among the largest in the history of our sector. We believe there will be more opportunities of this nature, which we are well positioned to capture. We start 2024 with strong new business pipelines across our company. We also see attractive M&A and REI co-investment opportunities. Investor and lender sentiment has improved, and we anticipate this will lead to increased transaction volumes starting in the second half of the year when short-term interest rates are expected to fall. Against this backdrop, we expect to achieve core EPS of $4.25 to $4.65 in 2024, implying mid-teens percentage growth at the midpoint of the range. This broad range reflects the difficulty in predicting the precise timing of a recovery. It is notable that any outcome in this range would still be well below the long-term earnings potential of CBRE. With that, Emma will walk you through our results and outlook in more detail.