One Building, Five Invoices: Inside the Full-Service CRE Model

Every full-service commercial real estate firm makes the same pitch to a prospective tenant: one platform, every market, every service line, under one roof. CBRE, Colliers, Cushman & Wakefield, JLL and Newmark all sell that story. What none of them show you is how much of that platform's revenue depends on the other side of your lease.

We went looking for a hard number—a tenant-representation versus landlord-representation revenue split, firm by firm, straight from the 2025 annual reports. It doesn't exist. In every one of the five reports, “Leasing” is listed as a single blended line. JLL's own 10-K describes its Leasing Advisory segment as covering both landlord and tenant representation, with no dollar figure attached to either side. Cushman & Wakefield and Newmark do the same. The disclosure that would let a client see how much of a firm's leasing book sits on the landlord's side of the table simply isn't required, and none of the five publicly report it.

JLL's 2025 10-K gets closer than the others, almost by accident. It discloses transaction counts, not revenue: approximately 19,500 agency (landlord) leasing transactions covering 340 million square feet, versus roughly 23,500 tenant representation transactions covering 569 million square feet, completed in 2025. That means JLL tracks which side of the table its brokers sat on for every single deal. The data clearly exists internally. It simply never gets translated into a dollar figure in a public filing.

What They Do Disclose

The segment data that is public tells a related story: how much of each firm's total revenue comes from serving ownership, investors, and lenders on business lines that have nothing to do with representing a tenant. The table below pulls the FY2025 figures directly from each firm's 10-K or year-end earnings release.

Two things stand out. First, Capital Markets—the business that represents building owners when an asset trades, with no involvement from any tenant—runs close in size to Leasing at every firm in the table. Second, at both Colliers and Newmark, the business lines built to serve ownership (Outsourcing/property management, Management Services) are larger than Leasing itself. Tenant relationships are not these firms' primary revenue engine; landlord, investor, and lender relationships are.

One Address, Five Invoices

Follow a single building through a full-service firm and the mechanics become clear. The firm's brokers represent the landlord marketing the space. Its capital markets team represents the owner when the building trades. Its debt and structured finance group arranges the buyer's financing. Its property management division runs the building day to day. Its valuation group appraises it for the lender. Every one of those checks is written to the same corporate parent—the same parent that, on a different floor, may also be representing a tenant negotiating a lease renewal in that exact building.

None of this requires any individual broker to act in bad faith. It's a structural incentive, not a personal one. When a firm's overall revenue is weighted toward landlord, investor, and lender relationships, and a tenant's broker draws a paycheck from that same firm, the interests in the room are not symmetric, and the public financials, as currently disclosed, are built so that gap never has to be quantified.

Questions Worth Asking a Full-Service Broker

• Has your firm, or an affiliated team, represented the landlord or the building owner in this market within the past year?
• Does your firm's Capital Markets or Property Management division have an active relationship with the ownership of any building being proposed to us?
• How is your team compensated relative to the firm's landlord-side and capital markets revenue in this market?

None of these questions require an accusation. They simply ask a full-service firm to disclose, deal by deal, what its own annual report does not disclose in aggregate.

The Comparison That Matters

Site Selection Group doesn't manage buildings for landlords,  broker investment sales unless it’s a sale-leaseback for a corporate client, or run a lending or loan-servicing business. Every fee we collect comes from one side of the table: the company deciding where to put its people or its next facility. There's no segment of our revenue that depends on keeping a landlord, an owner, or a lender happy, because we don't have one.

That's not a sales pitch. It's a structural fact about how our firm is built, and it's the fact that's missing from the other five annual reports.