Competitors

Competitors describe Colliers International Group Inc.'s market in their own filings and calls. These verified passages and visual pages show where their strategies meet, using source documents preserved in Sources.

CBRE Group, Inc. (CBRE)

The industry's largest firm and the only competitor that meets Colliers in all three of its segments at once: Advisory Services against Colliers' leasing, capital markets and valuation lines; Turner & Townsend against Colliers Engineering; and a $155.5bn investment-management platform against Colliers IM. CBRE is also roughly seven times Colliers' size, so its filings state the scale-advantage case that Colliers has to answer.

CBRE's self-description at the top of its FY2025 annual report. Note what it claims the advantage rests on — absolute scale, integrated delivery across 100-plus countries, and a central research/data/technology platform funded off the balance sheet. These are the same three claims Colliers must rebut with a partnership model and a narrower footprint.

CBRE is the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investments firm (based on 2025 revenue). We derive competitive advantage from our considerable scale and ability to offer integrated solutions for real estate investors and occupiers in more than 100 countries. We are global market leaders in most of our business lines and drive significant growth by helping clients optimize real estate costs, value, investment returns and workplace experiences. These capabilities, combined with our extensive knowledge platform (research, data, strategy, etc.), allow us to generate superior outcomes for our clients, which included nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies and many of the world’s largest institutional real estate investors in 2025. […] Our platform – the resources and infrastructure that support our professionals and underpin our growth, such as research, marketing, data and technology – combined with our balance sheet strength, provide us access to top talent and compelling growth opportunities.

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CBRE's formal Competitive Positioning disclosure. It splits the field into "a handful of well-established globally diversified real estate services firms that are smaller than CBRE" — the bracket Colliers sits in — and local specialists, and argues that client consolidation of vendor lists works in the largest firm's favour. This is CBRE's stated view of the structural trend, not an established fact.

Because of the range of services we provide and numerous markets we serve, we encounter a wide variety of competitors. These range from a handful of well-established globally diversified real estate services firms that are smaller than CBRE to many specialists that operate in specific geographies or business lines. Despite this competition, we are the market leaders in most of our business lines, with significant opportunities for continued growth. These opportunities result from the high value our clients place on our scale, in-depth expertise, technology and data-led insights, as well as their increasing preference for consolidating the number of service providers, which plays to our advantage in delivering integrated solutions globally. Our leadership across a wide spectrum of asset classes, including secular growth sectors like logistics and data centers, provides a diversified platform that is resilient across market cycles. Our strong balance sheet enables significant investments in our platform, market-leading talent recruitment and transformational M&A execution. […] At December 31, 2025, we had more than 155,000 employees (including Turner & Townsend employees) worldwide.

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Where CBRE's segment architecture overlaps Colliers' other two legs. Turner & Townsend (70%-owned since the January 2025 merger) is the project-and-cost-management business that sits alongside Colliers Engineering, and CBRE Investment Management reports $155.5bn of AUM against Colliers IM. The first passage is CBRE's framing of the outsourcing-consolidation tailwind it says favours scale platforms.

This segment benefits from multiple tailwinds, most notably an increased desire for large occupiers and investors to outsource and consolidate real estate services to optimize costs, operational efficiencies and workplace experiences. […] Our Project Management segment delivers program management, project management and cost consultancy services globally through Turner & Townsend, our majority owned subsidiary, which we acquired in 2021. In January 2025, we merged our wholly owned CBRE project management services business into Turner & Townsend and established Project Management as a separate business segment and now own 70% of the combined entity. […] With $155.5 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 2025, CBRE Investment Management (IM) is one of the leading investment platforms for global real assets. IM invests capital on behalf of pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, and other institutional investors in real estate, infrastructure, master limited partnerships and other assets.

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Jones Lang LaSalle Incorporated (JLL)

The other full-line global platform that pairs brokerage and outsourcing with a large investment manager (LaSalle), making it the closest structural analogue to Colliers' CRE-plus-IM combination. JLL names Colliers as a primary competitor in its own 10-K, and its management has publicly staked out a growth stance — organic first, M&A only opportunistically — that runs directly against Colliers' acquisition-led model.

JLL's competition disclosure, which names Colliers as one of five primary global rivals. Two things to take from it: JLL attributes its own position to consolidation while still calling the industry fragmented, and it lists a long tail of non-traditional entrants — banks, accounting firms, software companies and in-house corporate teams — as competitors. The FY2025 edition repeats the fragmentation language but drops the named-competitor list.

We operate across a wide variety of highly-competitive business lines within the commercial real estate industry globally. Our significant growth over the last decade, and our ability to take advantage of the consolidation which has taken place in our industry, have made us one of the largest commercial real estate services and investment management providers on a global basis, though the industry remains fragmented […] Increasingly, we also see companies who may not traditionally be considered real estate service providers, including investment banking firms, investment managers, accounting firms, technology firms, software-as-a-service companies, firms providing co-working space, firms providing outsourcing services of various types (including technology, food service and building products) and companies that self-perform their real estate services with in-house capabilities, entering the market. Some of our primary competitors include large national or global firms including CBRE Group Inc., Cushman & Wakefield plc, Colliers International Group Inc., Savills plc and Newmark Group Inc.

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JLL's stated case for why scale plus proprietary data is converting into share. The growth and margin figures are reported results; the causal link to "data and AI advantage" is management's interpretation. Relevant to Colliers because it is the same technology-and-scale argument CBRE makes, aimed at the same mid-market and institutional clients.

Christian Ulbrich, President and Chief Executive Officer: The combination of our market-leading advisory businesses and resilient revenue base drove record levels of first quarter revenue and earnings. […] Our data and AI advantage is driving productivity gains, increased market share and strong financial results across these businesses. Increased revenue and our disciplined operating rigor are unlocking strong profit growth and margin expansion. Adjusted EBITDA increased 24% and adjusted EPS was up 56%. […] We have established scale in large, growing and complex end markets through our integrated global service offering. We have the balance sheet, strong cash generation and capital strength and agility to execute targeted capital deployment with a focus on ROIC. And our investments in proprietary data and AI capabilities over the past decade are expanding JLL's competitive advantage.

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The clearest capital-allocation contrast in the peer set. JLL says it can compound high-single-digit organic growth without pursuing M&A aggressively, and holds every deployment — including LaSalle investment-management commitments — to a hurdle set by its own buyback. Colliers' model is the opposite: growth bought through acquisitions. Note JLL's read that sellers are nervous on price, which speaks to the deal market Colliers buys in.

Christian Ulbrich, President and Chief Executive Officer: As we stated at our Investor Day, we see significant growth opportunities in our core activities. We will focus on areas we already cover as core services and look for opportunities to increase market share in geographies where our market share may be lower than desired. If there is an attractive M&A opportunity, we will consider it. However, we are confident our organic growth rate will stay at a high single-digit level, so there is no need to pursue M&A aggressively. The M&A market has increased activity in our space and we see some nervousness on the seller side regarding achievable price levels, which may make opportunities more attractive in the coming six months depending on geopolitical developments. […] Mitch, every use of capital goes through rigorous analysis and must beat our hurdle, which is that it must be better than share repurchases. We looked at the proposals from our LaSalle colleagues, including the last investment and the one we spoke about today, and they are expected to be well above the returns we expect from share repurchases. Expanding LaSalle's footprint has implications beyond LaSalle's P&L, including cross-selling opportunities across JLL's broader platform. So when LaSalle presents a convincing idea with attractive returns, we are comfortable deploying capital to that opportunity.

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Cushman & Wakefield Ltd. (CWK)

The peer Colliers most often meets on the same pitch: global, brokerage-and-outsourcing led, with leasing, capital markets and valuation service lines mapped almost one-for-one onto Colliers' Commercial Real Estate segment. It names Colliers as a direct competitor, and — like Colliers — is a challenger to CBRE and JLL rather than the market leader, so its stated strategy is the nearest thing to a control case.

Cushman's market-structure thesis, stated as a revenue driver for "the largest commercial real estate services providers, including us": clients are consolidating vendor lists onto a few global platforms, and "those few firms with scalable operating platforms" capture the share and the margin. It is the same argument CBRE makes at p.8. The open question for Colliers is which side of that line a mid-scale platform falls on.

We operate in an industry where the increasing complexity of our clients’ real estate operations drives demand for high quality services providers. The sector also continues to be fragmented among regional, local and boutique providers. […] Global Services Providers Create Value in a Fragmented Industry. Clients are choosing to outsource commercial real estate services to global firms that can provide a fully integrated platform. Occupiers and investors continue to consolidate their services provider relationships on a regional, national and global basis to obtain more consistent execution across markets and to benefit from streamlined management oversight of “single point of contact” service delivery. Those few firms with scalable operating platforms are best positioned to improve their profitability and market share as real estate occupiers and investors become increasingly global and require commercial real estate services partners that can match their geographic reach and complex real estate needs.

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Cushman's competition disclosure. It claims membership of "the three largest global commercial real estate services firms" and puts Colliers in the next tier alongside Newmark — firms with "similar service competencies and geographic footprints." The ranking is Cushman's own; the useful part is the peer set it draws, which is the group Colliers is priced against.

Our experienced management team is focused on accelerating revenue, enhancing earnings per share, continuing to reduce leverage and recruiting and retaining top talent. […] We compete across various geographies, markets and service lines within the commercial real estate services industry. Each of the service lines in which we operate is highly competitive on a global, national, regional and local level. While we are one of the three largest global commercial real estate services firms, as measured by revenue and workforce, our relative competitive position varies by geography and service line. Depending on the geography or service, we face competition from other commercial real estate services providers, outsourcing companies, in-house corporate real estate departments, institutional lenders, insurance companies, investment banking firms, investment managers, and accounting and consulting firms. Although many of our competitors across our larger service lines are smaller local or regional firms, they may have a stronger presence in certain markets. We are also subject to competition from other large national and multinational firms that have similar service competencies and geographic footprints to ours, including Jones Lang LaSalle Incorporated (NYSE: JLL), CBRE Group, Inc. (NYSE: CBRE), Colliers International Group Inc. (Nasdaq: CIGI) and Newmark Group Inc. (Nasdaq: NMRK).

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A competitor answering an analyst on producer recruiting — the mechanism by which brokerage share actually moves. Cushman says it is landing Capital Markets and Leasing teams, and points at U.S. industrial as the pool it is recruiting into. The absorption and market-size figures are Cushman's own research. Colliers competes for the same producers in the same markets.

Julien Blouin (Goldman Sachs); Michelle MacKay, Chief Executive Officer: Just wondering on the Leasing results—were pretty impressive in the quarter. Can you remind us how much of that was driven by some of the recruitment initiatives over the last year? And from a recruitment standpoint more generally, how do you feel you stand today across your different segments? […] Thanks, Julien. Good morning. In terms of recruiting in general, we are doing extraordinarily well. We are building out the Capital Markets platform still, but we have had a significant number of hires there. First quarter, we had a significant number of Leasing recruits land as well. In industrial leasing, that has been a consistent bright spot for us over the past two years, so we expect to continue to do some really strong leasing there. We have recently landed some teams in Boston, and our expectation is that fundamentals will continue to be strong in U.S. industrial as minimal supply is out there. Let me give you just a couple of data points around Leasing, and industrial in particular. Demand is accelerating in Q1. Absorption in the U.S. was up 52% year-over-year, so this is a great place to recruit. […] But also importantly, the industrial leasing market is now 80% larger by dollar volume than it was pre-pandemic, and so as those leases roll over, transaction values are going to be significantly higher—so net-net, a tightening market there.

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Newmark Group, Inc. (NMRK)

The peer closest in scale to Colliers' Commercial Real Estate segment, and the only one that publishes an explicit estimate of the market both firms are chasing. It is also the sharpest strategic contrast: Newmark grows almost entirely by recruiting producers and has said so in terms that are directly critical of buying firms — the model Colliers runs. It names Colliers as a primary competitor and has begun buying into Canada.

Newmark's sizing of the shared market: a total addressable opportunity it puts at more than $400bn of annual revenue across public and private commercial real estate services firms. This is a competitor's own estimate, disclosed as an industry-trend assumption rather than an audited figure, but it is the only explicit TAM number any of Colliers' listed peers publishes.

We expect the following industry and macroeconomic trends to impact our market opportunity:

Large and Highly Fragmented Market. We estimate that the commercial real estate services industry is a more than $400 billion global revenue market opportunity. This TAM represents the actual and/or potential revenues that are or could be generated annually by public and private commercial real estate services firms.

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The fragmentation arithmetic behind the TAM: Newmark estimates the top ten global firms serve under 20% of the potential revenue pool, with the rest sitting in regional firms and in-house departments. Two implications for Colliers — the runway argument cuts both ways (it is available to every scale player), and Newmark flags investment management as a competitor service line it does not offer, which is precisely where Colliers earns its highest-margin income.

The estimated TAM also includes service lines offered by our public commercial real estate services competitors, but that Newmark currently does not, such as investment management. We estimate that less than 20% of the potential revenue in the global commercial real estate services market is currently serviced by the top 10 global firms (by total revenues), leaving a large opportunity for us to reach clients through superior experience and high-quality service, relative to both our larger competitors and the significant number of fragmented smaller and regional companies. We believe that clients increasingly value full service real estate service providers with comprehensive capabilities and multinational reach.

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The most direct strategic collision in the corpus. Newmark describes building a 1,200-person European business by hiring rather than acquiring, and its CEO argues that recruiting selects better people than buying a firm wholesale — "the plums as opposed to the pits." That is an explicit knock on the acquisition-led model Colliers runs. It is a competitor talking its own book, and it also concedes the slower ramp that comes with hiring.

Barry M. Gosin, Chief Executive Officer: We have also been very active. We launched Europe 36 months ago. We have 1,200 people in Europe. When we enter a new market, the new market gets excited, because what we bring to the table is a much more talent-friendly, enabling platform. We have done better than we had originally anticipated, and we have opened up Spain and Italy, and we have done a great deal in Germany, the U.K., and France. We are doing it in the Middle East, and we are doing it in Singapore. We are hiring people, and they want to come work for us. As long as the right people want to come to the platform, we are going to continue to hire the right people. It is a really good way to build a platform. In some cases, although the accounting is a little bit different, when you are hiring brokers and it takes time to ramp up, you have the better shot at getting the plums as opposed to the pits—sometimes when you buy a company with a lot of people.

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WSP Global Inc. (WSP)

The scaled-up version of the playbook Colliers runs in its Engineering segment (~31% of FY2025 revenue): a Canadian-listed professional-services consolidator growing through disciplined, serial acquisition of engineering and design firms. WSP is several times the size of Colliers Engineering, bids for the same acquisition targets and the same technical staff, and has publicly set out why it thinks scale and domain expertise defend the business against AI substitution.

WSP's own account of the buy-and-build engine: sixteen acquisitions over the 2022–24 plan, five in 2024 alone adding roughly 4,815 people, and POWER Engineers as the platform deal into power and energy. This is the same mechanism Colliers uses in Engineering, executed at a headcount roughly an order of magnitude larger — and it sets the price competition Colliers faces for mid-sized engineering targets.

Staying true to our disciplined approach to acquisitions, we completed five transactions, welcoming approximately 4,815 new colleagues. We further diversified our footprint and capabilities in key market sectors and regions, namely in EMEIA with the addition of Proxion and 1A Ingenieros, in the USA with AKF, and in Canada with Communica. […] Most significantly, we completed the transformational acquisition of POWER Engineers, realizing a pivotal strategic ambition and enabling WSP to become the preeminent pure-play global consulting firm for the world’s energy transition. […] Today, we have a team of approximately 73,000 talented professionals across the globe. […] By completing 16 strategic acquisitions during the three-year cycle, we also expanded our talent pool and deepened our capabilities in strategic areas.

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Stantec Inc. (STN)

Colliers Engineering's nearest North American analogue — Canadian-listed, a serial acquirer of the same 1,000-to-2,000-person engineering practices, competing in the same U.S. and Canadian infrastructure, water and buildings markets. Its management has articulated both the client shift towards mega-packages that favours the largest bidders and the thesis that AI pushes sub-scale firms towards consolidators.

Stantec's read on a structural shift in how engineering work is bought: clients bundling many projects into single mandates three orders of magnitude larger than a typical assignment, which narrows the bid list to "the big majors" and, on management's account, brings some pricing power. The pricing-power claim is Stantec's. The threshold question it raises for Colliers Engineering is whether it clears the bar to bid this work at all.

Jonathan Goldman (Scotiabank); Gord Johnston, President and Chief Executive Officer: The larger projects that you're booking in the U.S., is it possible to quantify or maybe directionally talk about how big those projects are relative to the average size project you do in the U.S.? Maybe also if you can talk about how the delivery kind of period or the conversion of those projects would compare to an average size order. Is this part of a bigger trend moving to more complex and larger projects than in the past? […] We are absolutely seeing a number of clients, both in Canada and in the U.S. that are sort of bundling large packages of projects together, in part because rather than them then having to run 10 projects, they run two, for example. But they're much larger. We are seeing the competitive set on those is much different because it's really only the big majors that can pursue those. The competitive set is different, which allows a little bit of pricing power in a number of instances. It's while an average project size might be in the CAD 100 thousand, couple hundred thousand CAD range, these ones could be in the CAD 100 million to a couple hundred million CAD range. […] We have, there's a smaller number of people within Stantec and the industry overall that can manage projects of that size. We're fortunate to have more than our fair share of them.

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A consolidator's case for why acquisition supply should keep coming: 1,000-to-2,000-person firms hit a ceiling where IT, cybersecurity, finance and HR need professionalising, and management argues AI raises that investment bar further. Useful to Colliers two ways — it supports the deal-flow assumption behind its own roll-up, and it identifies the same target cohort Colliers is bidding for.

Frederic Bastien (Raymond James); Gord Johnston, President and Chief Executive Officer: Guys, it feels like an engineering firm's ability to seamlessly embed AI with proprietary data will be a major competitive advantage going forward, and I think those, you know, those who invest accordingly will obviously be rewarded. Do you believe that will benefit larger firms like you over the small ones and potentially lead to more, you know, consolidation, acquisition opportunities? […] That is exactly our thesis as well, Frederic, that, you know, as we've talked over the past, some of the firms that have joined us, these 1,000, 2,000 person firms, you know, even before AI, they've got to this level, and then they need to professionalize IT and cybersecurity and finances and HR and such, and they don't have the resources either in terms of skills or finances to support that. They just wanna focus on the work. Now we see AI as even driving that more. That, just the additional investment in resources, both people and financially to get there. Plus, you know, the data probably isn't in common formats and all those things.

I do believe that this will, as we move forward, that AI and some of the things that we see there will continue to drive, more firms in that space towards the consolidators.

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