CBRE Group Inc

Greetings and welcome to the CBRE third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The 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 Shandi Luthra, EVP, Global Head of FP&A and IR. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to CBRE's third 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. Today's presentation contains forward-looking statements, including without limitation, statements concerning our business outlook, our business plans, and capital allocation strategy, the timing of expected asset sales, 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 and our NCC 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 Selentik, our chair and CEO, and Emma Giammartino, our chief financial officer. Throughout their remarks, when Bob and Emma cite financial performance relative to expectations, they are referring to actual results against the outlook we provided on our Q2 2024 earnings call in July, unless otherwise noted. Also, as a reminder, our resilient businesses include facilities management, project management, property management, loan servicing, valuations, and asset management fee in our investment management business. Our transactional businesses comprise sales, leasing, mortgage origination, carried interest, and incentive fee in the investment management business, and development fee. Finally, unless otherwise noted, whenever we cite growth rates, we are referring to the percentage change versus the 2023 third quarter in U.S. dollars. With that, please turn to slide five as I turn the call over to Bob.

Thank you, Chaudhny, and good morning, everyone. CBRE's performance in the third quarter was marked by strong financial results, operational gains across key parts of our business, and continued advancement in our strategic positioning. I'll comment briefly on all three areas, starting with our financial performance. We posted our second highest third quarter core earnings on record, with core earnings per share up 67%. All three business segments posted strong double digit revenue and segment operating profit growth, along with significant operating leverage. Key drivers included our resilient businesses, where net revenue grew 18% to $3.6 billion, led by Turner and Townsend, as well as leasing, which posted a 19% revenue increase fueled by accelerated office demand. In addition, Capital markets transaction activity has passed an inflection point and is in the early stages of recovery. Operationally, GWS's results reflect the cost efficiency efforts we discussed on our first quarter earnings call and put us on course for full year margin expansion. The integration of the CBRE project management business with Turner and Townsend is proceeding with pace and the combined business will start 2025 with considerable momentum. Consolidated free cash flow grew considerably, reflecting our focused efforts to improve cash conversion across our segments. On the strategic front, we have a strong pipeline of attractive investment opportunities, both for M&A in our services businesses and co-investments in our REI businesses. Further, our efforts to scale and diversify our business have resulted in a growing total addressable market. We've widened growth avenues in managing data centers and federal government facilities through recent acquisitions in GWS. And the Turner and Townsend CBRE project management combination opens up opportunities in infrastructure, energy, and data center projects. Geographically, our Japan and India businesses have grown to the point where they are the second and fifth largest contributors to advisory SOP. Our success and scale have positioned us for continued outsized growth in these huge economies, and we expect them to be disproportionate contributors to CBRE's future growth. For full year 2024, Our strong year-to-date performance and momentum entering Q4 have prompted us to raise our outlook for full-year core EPS to a range of $4.95 to $5.05, up from $4.70 to $4.90 previously. Now, Emma will discuss our third quarter results and outlook in greater detail. Emma? Thanks, Bob.