CBRE Group Inc

Greetings and welcome to the second quarter 2024 CBRE earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Shadini Luthra, Executive Vice President, Head of FP&A and Investor Relations. Thank you, Shalini. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to CBRE's second quarter 2024 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 want to say how excited I am to have joined CBRE last month. I know many of you will already, and others I'm looking forward to getting to know better in the weeks and months ahead. Now, I'll remind you that today's presentation contains forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements concerning expected benefits and synergies from the combination of Turner and Townsend and CBRE project management and other M&A transactions, our business outlook, our business plan and capital allocation strategy, and our earnings and cash flow 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 in 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 am joined on today's call by Bob Sulentic, 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.

Thanks, Jyotni, and welcome to CBRE. Good morning, everyone. CBRE had a successful second quarter for three reasons. First, revenue, profitability, and cash flow exceeded our expectations. Second, we made several sizable capital investments consistent with explicit elements of our strategy. Third, we made quick material progress on the cost challenges we identified last quarter. I'll briefly touch on all three. As a reminder, when Emma and I reference our performance relative to expectations, we are comparing results to the outlook provided on our last quarterly call. With this in mind, each of our three business segments outperformed expectations for both net revenue and segment operating profits. Highlights included Turner and Townsend's 18% net revenue increase, and revenue growth of 13% in U.S. leasing and 20% in mortgage origination fees. We believe that our advisory segment is on the cusp of an inflection point. On capital deployment, we made significant commitments in the quarter in support of our strategy. Combining CBRE project management with Turner & Townsend will create an exceptional operator in an enormous space with significant secular tailwinds. Given its scale, this combined business will have a profound impact on the future of CBRE. I'll discuss the implications of this move in more detail following Emma's remarks. We continue to make investments that take advantage of the lack of capital available for well-positioned real estate opportunities by committing approximately $250 million in the second quarter to development projects we believe can be harvested at favorable times in the cycle. Our investment management, development, and brokerage businesses enable us to identify and execute these opportunities, and our balance sheet gives us the capacity to act on them. Finally, our acquisition of DirectLine Global enhances our capabilities in data center management, a huge market that is growing rapidly. Regarding progress on costs, actions taken in our GWS segment resulted in improved margin versus Q1. This, coupled with new business wins, has put us back on track to achieve full year margin expansion along with mid-teens top-line growth and mid to high-teens bottom-line growth in this segment. Taking all of this into account, along with our expectations of a strong second half, we have increased our outlook for full-year core EPS to a range of $4.70 to $4.90, up from $4.25 to $4.65 previously. Now Emma will discuss our second quarter results and outlook in greater detail. Emma?