Dive Brief:
- Colliers reported more than $1.5 billion in revenues during the fourth quarter of 2024, led by 12% growth in real estate services, to more than $943 million, in the period.
- The quarter’s real estate services growth year over year includes increases of 12% increase in leasing, 23% in capital markets and 4% in outsourcing, per the company’s earnings release. Engineering revenues grew 61% year over year in the fourth quarter, to $421 million; those revenues increased 25% in the 2024 fiscal year, to $1.23 billion.
- “Engineering margins are expected to increase nicely from the impact of higher-margin acquisitions as well as margin expansion in our base business,” Christian Mayer, chief financial officer at Colliers, said on the Feb. 6 earnings call.
Dive Insight:
Colliers’ engineering platform consists of 8,000 professionals “underpinned by a strong recurring revenue base and robust contractual backlogs offering significant growth opportunities on a global basis both internally and through acquisition,” CEO Jay Hennick said on the call.
Recent acquisitions and strong internal growth drove revenue growth in engineering, with demand for technical services and other multi-disciplinary professional services increasing across most end-markets, the company said in its earnings presentation.
Despite “a bit of noise about some of the government spending in the U.S.,” the long-term tailwinds in infrastructure spending should continue to fuel growth, Mayer said on the call. “We have backlogs of work and clients with significant ongoing needs for services, for professional technical services around their various real assets that they have located across the continent and in Australia. So we feel pretty good about our prospects,” he said.
The company also saw strong growth in Q4 across all service lines in its real estate services segment, according to the presentation. This includes outsourcing, which grew to $328.5 million; leasing, which reached $359.4 million; and the capital markets unit, which reached $255.7 million. Leasing momentum increased with several large office and industrial transactions in the quarter, while capital markets transaction activity rebounded “across all geographies, particularly Europe and the U.S., and most asset classes,” Colliers said in its presentation.
“In real estate services, our capital markets business is showing cyclical recovery as interest rates and asset valuation stabilize, albeit slower than we expected,” Hennick said. “While performance hasn't yet reached the 2021 peak, our significantly larger scale now positions us extremely well to deliver even stronger results in the future as the market recovers.”
