Dive Brief:
- JLL’s real estate management services segment grew revenue 8% year over year in the second quarter of 2026 and is seeing increased momentum in office, industrial and data center leasing in the U.S., according to the company’s earnings report, released July 30.
- U.S. office leasing activity was up 12%, driving first-half volumes to a post-pandemic high, the company said. Gateway markets like New York and Los Angeles saw the strongest momentum, growing 27%.
- More than in the past, the company is seeing demand from clients wanting real estate services integrated into one package, which plays to the company’s strengths, CFO Kelly Howe said on its earnings call. “You can see [that in] the healthy growth that we’re posting,” she said.
Dive Insight:
During an investor briefing in March, JLL unveiled Accelerate 2030, a multi-year strategy to leverage its proprietary data, unified platform, industry intelligence, talent and AI competency.
“This is a muscle which you are training,” CEO Christian Ulbrich said of the strategy. “When you go into the gym, you don’t see the results immediately. But there’s an overall culture within our organization about sharing information and about working together with clients … and from a technology point-of-view, to make that very easy for our colleagues to cross-sell to each other.”
In an early win, the company has made progress adding AI and automation to its mobile platform to make it more efficient, Ulbrich said.
Across all segments, JLL’s consolidated revenue grew 10% to $6.9 billion, with $5.4 billion stemming from real estate management services.
The company’s workplace management business led the segment. Revenue from the business increased 10% year over year to $3.4 billion, thanks in part to organizations’ mandating that their employees return to the workplace. Project management revenue rose 3% to $971 million, with property management and portfolio services increasing 3% and 1%, respectively.
Software and technology solutions, previously JLL Technologies, grew 4% year over year.
JLL’s leasing advisory segment grew 24% year over year as a result of accelerated momentum in office, industrial and data center asset classes, the company said. U.S. office leasing revenue growth outperformed global volumes, up 24% versus 12%, which JLL attributed to a significant uptick in average office and industrial deal sizes and higher volume.
“A meaningful increase in deal size was complemented by healthy volume growth globally, most notably in the U.S., and in part due to resurgent demand from the technology sector, including from AI companies,” Howe said.
The company expects occupier demand and market fundamentals to continue strengthening, which will improve net absorption across major markets, especially as new supply remains at record lows, Howe said.
Markets continue to be characterized by a bifurcation between amenity-rich space that commands top dollar by occupiers focused on workplace experience and more bare-bones space that sits empty.
“We see new rent records for office space in almost every city around the world whenever new product is coming to market,” Ulbrich said. “At the same time, you go half a mile down the road [and] you have vacant buildings and no one wants to pick up.”
This bifurcation between companies working to bring people into the best available space and those not focused on employee experience is an ongoing trend in the market, he said.
“For the foreseeable future, overall volumes will continue to grow. But at least for our business, that is not as relevant as that trend of bifurcation,” Ulbrich said. “Because … we are very focused on the great, [class A] space. That’s where the majority of our market share is.”
JLL also is seeing success in the data center space, with 340 data centers contracted in its facilities management business at the end of Q2, Ulbrich said. That volume by gigawatt is expected to grow by a third over the next two quarters because of contracts with numerous large data centers, he said.
“This is ongoing, recurring revenue, [which] we are very focused on … and that is complemented by revenue on the transactional side,” he said.
