Colliers spent big last year on artificial intelligence to boost its professionals’ productivity as part of a multiyear plan to increase its competitiveness in all three of its business segments, CEO Jay Hennick said on the company’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call last week.
“Our CapEx this year around IT is bigger than it's ever been before in terms of our history by a meaningful amount,” Hennick said.
The spending marks a shift for a company that Hennick described as a very-low CapEx business, but he said the investment will pay off in 2-3 years as the professionals in its three businesses — commercial real estate, engineering and investment management — are able to do their work better.
“It's going to increase our [competitiveness] even more,” he said. “It's going to create more value for our professionals.”
The company in Q4 2025 generated revenues of nearly $1.6 billion, up 5% year over year, with growth across all segments, according to Colliers’ earnings release. For the year it generated revenue of $5.5 billion, up roughly 15% from $4.9 billion in 2024.
Fourth quarter net revenue from its commercial real estate segment rose 7%. Revenue from its capital markets business increased 13%, while its leasing business grew 3%.
“The growth you're seeing in commercial real estate is focused around capital markets,” Colliers CFO Christian Mayer said on the call. Office and industrial were the commercial real estate sectors with the most activity, he said. The company sees that trend extending into 2026. The company also saw higher outsourcing activity across all commercial real estate services, led by valuation and advisory, according to Colliers’ earnings presentation
Net revenue in its engineering segment was up 8%. An acquisition of Spain-based engineering company Ayesa Engineering, announced Feb. 3, is expected to grow the business more, mostly outside North America, according to Hennick. That could change as the expertise of Ayesa’s engineers, particularly in desalination and other water-based infrastructure projects, filters into Colliers’ engineering business as a whole, Mayer said.
“The transferability of skills is something that we do look at whenever we make an acquisition,” Mayer said. “So certainly, with Ayesa's capabilities, [particularly] in the water space, that will be something we'll look at.” The deal is expected to close in the second quarter, according to Colliers’ earnings release.
On the company’s investment in AI, Hennick said he sees the technology enabling Colliers’ professionals in its commercial real estate business to do deals better and faster by giving them access to data and data analytics beyond what they have now and freeing them up from low-level tasks.
“If [employees] have more information at their fingertips, they're going to be able to execute transactions faster,” he said.
Colliers is combining its proprietary data with data from Google Cloud and other providers to give its real estate team an analytics advantage, Hennick said.
“We're the only ones in the industry” with this kind of Google Cloud partnership, he said. “[Google Cloud has] unique and probably the most … commercial real estate data out there. And so we're leveraging that as well as their capability at doing what they do.”
Colliers also hopes AI will eliminate work redundancy and speed routine tasks that are on its professionals’ to-do lists, Hennick said.
“Our professionals can do the mundane, the menial tasks faster and get to the real value-add stuff,” he said. “We think that we'll become way more efficient. We'll be able to reduce our costs, not just our IT costs, but also labor across the world, and that's going to only drive increased margins.”
Leveraging the technology isn’t about taking professionals out of their roles, he said. “AI enhances rather than replaces our business across all three segments,” he said. “Judgment, accountability, qualifications and licensure as well as important client relationships remain central to how we operate. Put simply, it makes our professionals even better at what they do for our clients.”
