Integrated real estate giant CBRE reported 16% year-over-year revenue growth in its building operations and experience segment as it makes significant strides in data center management and office leasing, the company said Thursday in its first quarter 2026 earnings release.
Facilities management rose 13%, led by strength in the Americas, where revenues increased almost 30% year over year, helping to drive mid-teens percentage growth in local facilities management, the company said. Enterprise facilities management revenue grew by double digits, led by the technology, industrial and life sciences sectors, according to CBRE's 2Q26 earnings report. Project management revenue increased 11%, with growth underpinned by strong infrastructure activity and double-digit real estate growth in the U.S.
Critical infrastructure services revenue surged 71%, fueled by strong growth in its Data Center Solutions division and contributions from Pearce Services, an infrastructure engineering company that CBRE acquired at the end of last year.
“Our move into critical infrastructure and data center services is going to be at least as profound as our move into outsourcing in the 1990s and early 2000s, and much faster,” CBRE CEO Bob Sulentic said on the company’s April 23 earnings call.
Overall CBRE revenue grew 19% year over year to $10.5 billion. That growth includes increases of 22% for transactional businesses and 18% for resilient businesses.
Resilient businesses include facilities management, critical infrastructure services, property and project management, loan servicing, valuations, other portfolio services and recurring investment management fees. Transactional businesses include property sales, leasing, mortgage origination, carried interest and incentive fees in the investment management business, and development fees.
The company generated more than $3 billion in revenue from infrastructure activities in 2025 and nearly $950 million in the first quarter of 2026. That line of business includes services provided to data centers along with telecom and power asset businesses from the Pearce acquisition, Sulentic said.
Data center leasing revenue more than tripled from the previous year. “We … have secured dozens of land sites that have the potential to be data center land sites over time, and we are working with various data center users, especially the hyperscalers, to get that land entitled and [to bring] power [and] water to the land,” Sulentic said. “We think we will have a relatively steady stream of opportunities in data center land over the next few years.”
The firm’s partnership with Meta to launch a data center trade skills training program LevelUp, announced on Monday, is “definitely not a one-time thing,” Sulentic said. “We are building capability in multiple cities around the U.S. to recruit, train, and place technical people to support Meta’s data center initiative. It is really hard to get those people. We are recruiting and training those people and sending them not only into CBRE Group, Inc.’s teams to support Meta, but into our competitors and others in the market.”
He added that Meta selected CBRE because of its ability to hire and train people. “We have a big operation in that regard,” he said. “We hire something like 30,000 people a year. The bottom line is, with these companies that we interface with to do critical infrastructure and data center work, there is a broad base of things that we can do to support them.”
U.S. property sales revenue also spiked, increasing 64% as all major property types delivered double-digit increases, he said.
“Coming out of COVID, CBRE .. was and continues to be a massive office building business,” Sulentic said. “COVID hammered everything about office buildings, but we moved aggressively into industrial land, multifamily land and multifamily development. Within two years, we were back to record earnings.”
U.S. office leasing revenue jumped 15% year over year, with broad-based strength across gateway and non-gateway markets, according to CFO Emma Giamartino.
On the leasing front, Sulentic said, flexible space activity is heating up through Industrious, which CBRE acquired last year after having an ownership interest in it for several years. The number of Industrious units that CBRE is adding is exceeding expectations and its underwriting for the business.
“We are quite pleased with the pace at which we are adding those [flexible] units, and we expect it to continue this year and into the foreseeable future,” Sulentic said. “We bought that business because we thought it was a premium offering that would be interesting to corporates in addition to small and medium-sized businesses, and we are seeing that play out. Just like we are seeing strength in every other part of the office market, we are seeing good momentum there.”
