Morning, everyone. For those of you who don't know, I am Raymond Mikulich. I am the Chairman of the Board of the Altus Group, I welcome you all to the 2019 annual meeting of the shareholders. On behalf of the board, management team, and the 2,500 employees of the Altus Group, I wanna thank you all for joining us today, welcome you, and tell you you're gonna hear about a lot of exciting things that are going on at the company today. Many or all of the board is with us today. I'm gonna introduce them quickly, ask them to stand, then we will move on from there. Let me introduce the board, Well, yeah, I guess What order are we in? We're in order of tenure, I guess.
Angela Brown, who is the Chairman of our Governance and Nominating Committee. She also serves on the Audit Committee and is the most recent addition to the board. Janet Woodruff, next to her, has joined the board about four years ago. She's a member of the Audit Committee and the HR and Compensation Committee. Diane MacDiarmid, well, they've lined up in order. This is great. Joined us in 2012. Serves on both the Governance Nominating and the HR and Compensation Committee. Anthony Gaffney has been on the board seven years. He drew the short straw and is responsible for Human Resources and Compensation, which is a very busy committee in a place, in a firm that's evolving the way we are.
We'll talk about that in a little bit. Eric Slavens is our longest tenured member of our board. He's also the very capable Chairman of our audit committee. How long have you been in that seat?
15 years. I was only 12 when he took that position.
Carl Farrell joined our board three years ago, and you will know him now better as the President of the Altus Group. He's been in that position about 16 months. And finally, and most notable, is Bob Courteau, who is seated next to me here on my right, who has been the CEO of the firm for the last seven years. You'll be hearing from Bob in a little while after we get through the meeting.
With that, I just say that I've been thrilled and privileged to be the Chairman of this group. It is really a hardworking, serious group, and I can assure the shareholders that these are people who are not phoning it in. This has been a busy year for us. Everybody has been very much engaged. They've worked very hard. We've done a lot. We'll tell you about a fair amount of it during the day today, during the proceedings today. I just wanna thank them all personally for their dedication and their work during the year. Thank you all. In addition to Bob and Carl, there's a couple members of our C-suite who are with us and will be participating today. I want to introduce them upfront.
First is our Chief Financial Officer, Angelo Bartolini, who has been with the firm for quite some time now. He's on the end, and you'll be hearing from him. Leanne Ettore, our General Counsel, who is on my left at the end of the table. We've reduced Leanne's role in this this year. She doesn't have a speaking part, I don't think, do you? Finally, Trish Ball, who is the head of our Where's Trish? Let everybody see you, Trish, who's head of our human resources area. There are many employees and members of the management team here in the room today. For you shareholders, I ask you to seek them out. For the employees, I ask you to seek out the shareholders.
Time limits make it impossible to introduce everybody. I would just like to say that it's been a busy year. Everyone's worked very hard. We've had some good successes this year, and I wanna thank all the employees of the firm who've spent their time and energies making it another successful year for us. Thank you. You know, you hear a little bit of this every year from me, Altus is operating in a very and increasingly dynamic market, the PropTech market, let's call it, put a name on it. Everybody else does. We're in the PropTech market. It is a very dynamic market, increasingly so every year.
And as a result of that, it is necessary for the firm to continue to evolve along with that market to do two things. One is to, and most importantly, maintain our prominence in the market, but also to be a kind of a leader, a thought leader in that marketplace. That is no easy task. It is, it is a big challenge, particularly when you're, I don't want to say burdened, but when you've got that legacy position, everybody is shooting at you. Everybody is trying to take us out. Nobody has succeeded. The pace of innovation in the industry is accelerating dramatically, and as a result, we at Altus Group have had to accelerate our evolution also.
You will hear from Bob later today that we have accelerated, if you will, the pace of our innovation. This year, the big innovation is moving to the cloud. That is a very big step for us. It advances our evolution from that old world personal service company to a very modern, technology-based and global leader of the commercial real estate industry. Not the industry itself, but the technology side of the business. We've done that and are doing that all at the same time that we're maintaining the leading position in the marketplace. That is no easy task, I promise you. It has required the company and the management team to do some, you know, perform some miracles along the way. It's no easy thing.
It's no small task. You're gonna hear from Bob a bit later about how he's done that and how the management team has brought that to fruition. Commensurate and with the company changing, the board too has to stay on top of things and needs to continue to change its skills and capabilities along with the company. Among the duties of the board is helping management recruit and retain high-quality people, particularly at the senior levels. As you all know, 16 months ago, we asked Carl to step into the role of the president of the company.
I think it's fair to say, and the board would join me in this, in saying that he settled into the position very nicely, and among many other things, has been very effective in driving the development and marketing efforts at the firm. We also promised last year that we would be reviewing and expanding our board. We have, as you saw in the proxy materials, we have nominated two excellent additions to the board for shareholder consideration. I don't, you know, the spoiler alert, I think they were elected. Anthony Long joins us with a background in technology and 31 years in the real estate business primarily in the United States.
Colin Dyer, excuse me, was most recently the CEO of Jones Lang LaSalle, which is one of the predominant, largest global real estate service businesses. We are delighted to have them both. They bring great experience and many years of experience in the commercial real estate business. Those are our clients, if you will. Both of the firms that they come from are our clients, and they add a great expertise to the board. I guess I should mention that it's worth noting that reinforcing that idea that we're continuing to evolve the board along with as the company evolves is over the last eight years, we have brought on nine new members to the board.
This is a relatively small board, so that's a substantial, significant change and turnover in the board as the company has evolved its business plan. How do we do that? Each year, we assess the capability skill set of the board and reassess the skills and expertise that are necessary at the board level so that we can provide the appropriate leadership to the company. Those assessments provide us insight in our recruiting, they did so this year. During 2018, led by Angela, who did a great job, we refreshed and actually redid our survey mechanism and came up with results that basically said we would like to add more real estate expertise to the board. Certainly, Colin and Tony do that. They're particularly well-suited to fill that role.
As of today, three of the eight independent directors have long tenure and experience in the real estate industry. Another three of the eight independent directors have global experience in the technology sectors. 40% of the nominated directors live or work in the U.S., which is a region that represents nearly 40% of our revenues. This year, we've also adopted Say on Pay. This was our first year for that, and the results are in. We will talk about that later. We have continued to evolve our policies with regard to the company and the board. If you'd like to learn more, feel free, and please, go to the website to look at the board policies.
Bob and Angelo will get into all the, all the exciting stuff about the company, and things that are happening. I get the undistinguished part of running the meeting, so I am going to call the meeting to order at 9:12-ish. We will get started with and address a few procedural matters. With the consent of everyone in the room and the rest of the shareholders, I will act as chairman of the meeting. Leanne will act as secretary, and AST Trust Company, who is our transfer agent, will act as scrutineer of the voting through its agents who are on site.
In order that we have a complete record of those in attendance, if you have not registered at the front desk, please make sure you do so that we have a complete record of those in attendance. We will be dealing with a number of formal, what I'd call administrative matters. In the effort to be expedient in doing that, we've, like, asked a few shareholders or proxy holders to make resolutions to bring forth resolutions and to second them. That does not exclude anybody in the room or any shareholder from speaking. If you would like to speak, bring a resolution, please, catch my attention. When I recognize you, we will gladly listen to what you have to say. With that, let's get started.
Leanne, if you would, please table the notice of meeting, the form of proxy, the management information circular that's dated March 22nd, 2019, and the declaration of mailing proving service of notice of all the materials mentioned to the shareholders of record of the corporation. For those of you who don't have them, copies of all of this material is available in the back. Okay. I will confirm that all of these materials have been delivered to the directors. Therefore, as the notice of the meeting has been tabled, is available for inspection, we will dispense with the reading of the notice of the meeting unless there are any objections. Is there anyone who wants to spend the morning reading it? No. Okay. Hearing no objections, we will proceed.
The scrutineer has provided me with a preliminary report of the shareholders in attendance and representation at this meeting. The scrutineer's preliminary report indicates that there are 229 shareholders represented at the meeting, either in person or by proxy. They represent or they hold in aggregate 32,780,000 shares, or about 83% of the shareholding, which is frankly extraordinary for it to be that high. We do have a quorum present, either present or represented by proxy, and I declare that the meeting is duly and properly constituted. I ask Leanne to please include the declaration of the meeting and the notice of the meeting and the scrutineer's final report on attendance in the meeting, in the minutes of the meeting.
The scrutineer has also reported that based on the proxies submitted before the meeting, a significant majority of the votes eligible to be cast would be voted in favor of the matters to be voted upon at today's meeting if a ballot were to be conducted in respect to those matters. In the interest of time, voting will be conducted by a show of hands unless a ballot is demanded for any matter. With those being the rules of the road, I'd like to now table the 2018 financial statements and the auditor's report, which again are available both on the website and are available in the back of the room. Bob and Angelo will go through those a bit in a little while. Then we should get to the election of the directors.
Our corporate governance provides for the election of directors, according to the company's majority voting policy. For those of you who would like to see it, a full description of this policy is in the management information circular. The management circular includes the background of the 10 candidates that have been proposed by management to be the directors of the corporation for the coming year. The nominees for election as directors of Altus Group Limited are Angela Brown, Robert Courteau, Colin Dyer, Carl Farrell, Tony Gaffney, Anthony Long, Diane MacDiarmid, Raymond Mikulich, Eric Slavens, and Janet Woodruff. If elected, the nominees will hold office until the next annual meeting of the shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed. May I have a motion for the nomination of the 10 individuals I've just named?
Chairman, I so move.
Thank you. Second?
Second the motion.
Thank you. Are there any further nominations? Having seen no show of hands, there is no further nominations. The nominations are closed. Our majority voting policy contemplates that separate motions be held to elect each director. However, as a scrutineer has advised that there are sufficient votes to approve the motion to elect each of the 10 nominees. Unless a shareholder or proxy holder requests separate motions to elect the individuals, I propose that we proceed with a single motion. We will do so. May I have a motion for the resolution that these nominees be elected?
Chairman, I so move.
Second the motion.
Thank you. All those in favor, please raise your hand. Contrary? Opposed? Objections? Consistent with the vote we got by proxy. Thank you. The motion carries. I declare Angela Brown, Robert Courteau, Colin Dyer, Carl Farrell, Anthony Gaffney, Anthony Long, Diane MacDiarmid, Raymond Mikulich, Eric Slavens, and Janet Woodruff to be duly elected as directors of the Altus Group Limited. Next order of business is the appointment of our auditor for the current year and authorizing the directors to fix their remuneration. Every year I have trouble with that. Next year, it's gonna be compensation. With the recommendation of the audit committee, the board recommends that the present auditor, Ernst & Young LLP, be retained for the current year. May I have a motion to appoint Ernst & Young LLP as the auditor for the current year and authorizing the board to fix the remuneration of the auditor?
Mr. Chairman, I move that Ernst & Young LLP be appointed as auditor of the corporation for the current year to serve at such remuneration as may be fixed by the board of directors.
I second the motion.
All those in favor, please raise your hand. Any objections? The motion carries. I declare Ernst & Young LLP to be appointed as auditor of the corporation for the current year to serve as, at such remuneration as may be fixed by the board of directors. The final item on the agenda is the advisory vote on our approach to compensation. As I said at the onset, this is our first year of having this advisory vote on the agenda. It's an opportunity for the shareholders to express their views with regard to how we structure and pay our people with management in particular. May I have a motion to approve Altus Group's approach to compensation?
Chairman, I move on an advisory basis and not to diminish the role and responsibilities of the board of directors, that the shareholders of Altus Group accept the approach to executive compensation described in Altus Group's Management Information Circular for the 2019 annual meeting of shareholders.
I second the motion.
Thank you. All in favor? Any opposed? The motion carries. I declare the non-binding advisory resolution accepting the company's approach to executive compensation as passed. If there's any other business that a shareholder would like to bring before this meeting, please raise your hand. If not, would somebody please move to terminate the meeting?
Chairman, I move to terminate the meeting.
The motion.
That concludes the formal business of the annual meeting as set out in the notice of the meeting. I declare the 2019 annual meeting of the Altus Group Limited to be closed. I will now proudly turn over the proceedings to Bob and Angelo. We'll begin with Angelo, our CFO, who will take us through the financials. Before they begin, let me remind everyone to take note of the cautionary cautions regarding forward-looking information set out at the beginning of the slide presentation, which pertains to both of their presentations. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today to connect with shareholders and provide you with an update on the company's progress. I'll start off with a brief recap of our financial performance in 2018, and then I'll turn it over to Bob to take you through our vision for long-term growth and the market fundamentals that are driving our strategy. Before I begin, I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone that we are currently in a quiet period, as our Q1 results will not be released until tomorrow, May eighth. My remarks on financial performance will be limited to our historical results for 2018. 2018 was a significant year of accomplishment for Altus Group.
Thanks to the commitment and hard work of more than 2,500 employees worldwide, we continue to add significant value to our clients with innovative commercial real estate software and Altus Analytics solutions and expert services. All the while, we delivered robust financial results. During the year, we executed on numerous growth initiatives across our business to further the long-term strategy. The combination of growth initiatives, investments, and reorganization efforts were among the factors that contributed to performance. As a quick recap of key highlights, our consolidated annual revenues passed an important threshold, surpassing CAD 500 million. Consolidated revenues increased 7% to CAD 510 million, driven by continued growth from our property tax and Altus Analytics business. Overall, I'm pleased with the robust performance across all businesses as we had steady year-over-year revenue growth from virtually all of the CRE and Altus Analytics offerings.
After delivering a five-year, nine and a half adjusted EBITDA CAGR in 2017, we made a strategic decision to increase our investment spending in order to ramp up the future growth. For 2018, adjusted EBITDA declined 12% to CAD 71 million, reflecting our investment spend, as well as reflecting headwinds faced by our property tax business, where government-driven process changes in key markets caused a deferral of revenues into future periods. We have high conviction in the investments we made and expect to see impactful returns in quarters to come. These investments include the acquisition of Taliance, a solution which provides modeling, forecasting, and risk management capabilities at the fund level for investment management firms, and the continued ramp-up of our investments in cloud. In November of last year, we released our ARGUS Cloud product and first cloud application, ARGUS Acquire.
ARGUS Cloud enables AE functionality in the cloud while seamlessly integrating with its AE on-premise version. Our plan is to continue to bring several new cloud applications and APIs over the next couple of years. Another noteworthy financial and operational highlight is our continued penetration into Europe. A significant share of our revenue growth was derived in the U.K. and Continental Europe through expansion of our appraisal management services, higher software sales, and increased market share in our U.K. tax practice, where we successfully integrated the acquisition of CVS into our legacy business. The revenue contribution from near Europe grew to 17% from 11% in the prior year. Finally, during the year, we sold our stake in Real Matters and used the net proceeds of approximately CAD 54 million to pay down debt, thus providing us with additional leverage and capital to pursue acquisitions and further growth investments.
We are pleased with the strong improvements all round and believe that progress achieved in 2018 sets the groundwork for a productive 2019 and beyond. A historical view of past performance shows a solid growing revenue trend line, as well as increasing adjusted EBITDA, save the years where certain macro events impacted our margins, such as in 2015 and 2016, where a decline in oil prices resulted in a decline in our Geomatics business, or in years when we ramped up investments in our Analytics business, such as 2015 and 2018. This is a little akin to the old adage of taking a step backwards to actually move two or three or four steps forward. With these investments, we are creating sustainable long-term value that is highly recognized by our large, stable shareholder base.
Our financial profile continues to evolve as our business models transition towards software, data, and information services. In 2018, revenues of our Altus Analytics business increased by 9% to over CAD 180 million and consisted of 36% of consolidated revenues. Of note, approximately 70% of these revenues are considered to be recurring. Recurring revenues grew 10% in the year, and we continue to see an increasing trend to greater subscription and recurring revenues in our business going forward. Our CRE consulting practices also performed well throughout the year, posting 9% revenue growth. In particular, property tax grew over 11% despite headwinds from the government process changes in Ontario and the U.K., which caused contingency revenues to decline in the H2 of last year. Today, property tax represents 35% of our revenue base.
We continue to see a strong opportunity for further market share growth in the U.K. and the U.S., excuse me, and expect Ontario to contribute strongly once the appeal settlements begin to take hold. Although our cost, RVA, Canadian RVA, and Geomatics businesses are relatively smaller revenue contributors to our overall business today, they are nonetheless exceptionally well-run and stable contributors to our growth and profitability. There has been significant progress made in implementing technology in their business processes, and we are excited about some of the advancements, such as the use of ARGUS EstateMaster in our cost group in both internal and client workflows. Overall, we are growing our global footprint with our core products and services.
We continue to grow a greater presence in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, as nearly 60% of our revenues are now derived from these markets. Our financial profile remains strong. We continue to generate strong cash flows from our operations at nearly CAD 50 million in 2018, with strong recurring base in Altus Analytics. We have a strong historical track record of revenue and EBITDA growth while investing for future growth and value creation. Our balance sheet remains strong with a 1.79x debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio and with additional capacity for investments and acquisitions. We continue to provide above average shareholder returns over the long term, as evidenced by our five-year 15.7% total shareholder returns. With that, now I will turn it over to Bob. Thank you.
[inaudible] Morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Really excited to have so many of our friends come out today and share with us the excitement that we have for our business and to hear a little bit about what we're gonna do in the future. Now, every year, I start with a slide that talks about the trends in our industry. I've been basically putting this slide up for six or seven years now, and it just gets better. When you think about what's going on in the commercial real estate industry right now, new entrants, more allocations to commercial real estate, more complexity. Regulation is now something that really is driving how people have to operate these businesses. Demand for transparency, the push to liquidity. Frankly, everywhere you look in this industry, there's opportunities for data and technology.
We knew that coming in, but there's some new trends now on the horizon that really make it more exciting this year than ever before. Specifically, there's some tailwinds going on right now. If you think about what these large real estate companies have to deal with now, the need to have strategic partnerships that span the globe, to be able to count on a service provider that can drive a consistent level of information around the world, to have the ability to work with a partner that can give them the back office support that they need to be able to operate their business is a key driver on one of the big trends that's going on in this industry. Frankly, because of new entrants and the increasing allocations towards commercial real estate, there's also a competition for talent.
With our strategy of being a global company, a global modern company combining professional services, software and data, we're uniquely positioned to take advantage of these trends. For me, the other part of this opportunity is the ability to use software not only in serving the needs of capability in making informed decisions, but as the platform for collecting data for the industry is really, really exciting for us right now. When I think about, you know, some of the trends that are going on in the industry, we all know that there's a huge amount of investment in PropTech technology. When I joined the company, there was less than 1,500 companies that created software solutions for this industry. Now well on track to over 6,000.
There was less than CAD 500 million being invested in real estate technology back in 2013, closer to CAD 300 million. There's gonna be well over CAD 6 billion invested in real estate technology as we go forward into 2019. I call this the push. This is the change that's going on in our market that sees the same opportunities that we do in serving this industry. The big change that's gone on in this industry, if we go to the next slide, is the idea of the pull. The pull is there's new leaders in our industry. When you look at some of the new entrants and new value players, we see a different type of leader in these companies.
We're seeing leaders that want software, that want data, that believe in the art of a modern company and combining value to make great decisions. These same leaders, these people that are pulling value in, are also now starting to invest in technology for their own company. What's fascinating through, you know, we do an annual innovation report. In our latest report, we asked the question about whether you're investing in PropTech terms, PropTech firms, 53% of the companies have said they make some form of investment, many of them direct. Not only are these companies now in a position where they can take value from this sea of PropTech firms, they're placing bets on the best ones.
They're doing that in a way where they can now take this technology and make it successful in their own firm, which is gonna accelerate the use of software and data in our industry. Frankly, if you think about this trend and the adoption curve on commercial real estate, we have an opportunity to prove out this model in ways that our technologies will be adopted, but do it on a global level, and we're already seeing this happening for our company. We've seen companies, some of the largest companies in the world, taking ARGUS everywhere. They're doing this on the basis originally having visibility to their global data. From a perspective of their global valuation, very quickly turning into an understanding of the global performance of their assets.
There's a catch globe going on between the ability to look at their assets globally, to collect that data in a normalized way, and now with the cloud to represent that in a way that they're managing their business. This is a big change. I call this the pull in our industry. Again, Altus Group is uniquely positioned to take advantage of that. Now we have references with the largest clients in the world that are using our software, our data, and our professional services to better operate their business, to deal with the challenges of going global, to deal with the expertise required to operate these assets on a global basis. For me, you know, over the years, we've enabled ourselves to have a broad variety of advisory services.
Our RVA business in the U.S., which provides good insight into over 100 open funds, has now transformed into doing much more in terms of providing visibility on performance and benchmarking to give an index. As we've gone to Europe and Asia now, we actually provide a different set of services. An adjacent set of services all wrapped around the idea of giving global visibility and transparency to the biggest funds in the world. As we look ahead, we're gonna push our whole platform onto the cloud, and that will give complete portfolio transparency and insight. We're gonna enable our clients to unlock the value of their data, not only for the data that they own, but the data that we produce and the data that our partners produce.
We'll have tenet technology-enabled expert services to help our clients manage the complexities of this industry. We'll combine data, software, and services to help clients maximize the value of their CRE assets and investments, frankly, to make better decisions. When I think about our strategic growth initiatives to achieve this, it's a five-point strategy. First of all, our long-term objective is to transition Altus Analytics from a collection of high-value point solutions to an enterprise-grade software and data analytics market leader that unifies valuation and asset management capabilities into a single cloud-based platform for the CRE industry. To achieve this, we'll continue to expand the global adoption of ARGUS Enterprise while developing a product roadmap that will further enhance recurring revenues. We're approaching this with a very comprehensive ARGUS everywhere strategy. We're also concurrently expanding our appraisal management data platform on a global basis.
For our CRE consulting businesses, our objective is to grow and scale our property tax business to a leading independent global property tax advisory practice that leverages technology and data. Our current penetration is still modest relative to the opportunity ahead. We're pursuing organic initiatives, financially accretive acquisitions, and enhancing it with a technology platform. We're also tech-enabling all of our services business and continuously strive to improve each business and capitalize on growth prospects to enhance all of our client offerings and internal capabilities. Finally, underlying all of this, we're establishing ourselves for the attractive opportunity in data, and we are pivoting.
Through our cloud strategy at Altus Analytics and by collecting our services data through a common platform, this provides us with a unique long-term opportunity to repurpose and eventually monetize this data to drive differentiation, launch new products, and strengthen our recurring revenue streams, and frankly, to position us as a platform for the industry. Just a couple of comments in closing. I'll summarize some of our investment highlights. First of all, we're among the best in our industry. Our expert services business are market leaders, where our depth is unmatched in the industry, and our Altus Analytics business is deeply rooted with existing market standards. Our ARGUS software is the de facto standard for global property and portfolio analysis. Our benchmarking and attribution analysis is the standard for the U.S. CRE open funds.
Our Canadian market data is the most widely consumed data in Canada. Not only are our solutions heavily embedded in our clients' daily workflows, they influence the industry. We work with over 50,000 firms with our services business, and we have over 6,500 software clients, including some of the world's largest commercial real estate companies, who are deploying our capabilities on a global basis. Just in ARGUS alone, we have Tens of thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of models that get produced annually that drive a sea of information, and we shall monetize that. Although we are one of the biggest in our category, we also feel that we've only scratched the surface as it pertains to our growth potential. We have a long growth runway ahead.
The market fundamentals are in our favor, and we're well-positioned to capitalize on the increasing need for CRE tech adoption and our expert advisory services. Look, we're in a privileged position, but we don't take it for granted. We think we have limited competition, but when you see 6,000 software coming at you know that you have to run. We have wide moats, but we will continue to invest to increase our value proposition. This is a hungry company. This is an ambitious management team, and I think we've been able to attract an amazing board of directors because they see the opportunity.
We're ahead of the competition, we're ahead of new market entrants, but we also know that the focus on driving a platform for growth will be challenging, especially for our long-term goal for Altus Group to be the data integration platform for the global CRE industry. The barriers to entry are strong due to our industry-standard products, scale, and global customer adoptions. We have invested in our future to expand our position. I can tell you our success in Europe is proving out the demand, the need for these solutions because we're invoking a new model, a model that combines our capabilities to go after that market. This is a race for innovation and change and finding new ways to do business. The wide moats around our business are in part due to our large and global customer base.
Our reputation is only as strong as the clients that we represent. I'm pleased to say that Altus Group has an unmatched client base with a long list of global blue-chip companies, including many of the most influential in the industry. As we follow the largest real estate companies in the world into the markets that they wanna serve, we create this thing called tech envy or data envy. That's a big part of our strategy. To do that, we have to run like never before. We have to hire the best people, and we have to find ourselves meeting the standard of very, very discerning clients. As you heard today from Angelo, we have a strong financial profile with a solid balance sheet and strong cash generation. Above all, we believe we're a growth company, and our balance sheet supports our growth strategy.
As I hope you've observed firsthand over the years, we have a strong track record of execution. If you take a five-year view, the financial and operating results of what we have accomplished speak for itself. Nearly a 10% five-year revenue CAGR and a 4% earnings CAGR inclusive of two investment phases. Plus all that we've accomplished with our product roadmap, international expansion, and innovation, it makes me proud to lead this team. I often refer to Altus Group almost as a startup company. That's the way we feel. That's who we think we are. Yet, what the team has accomplished over the past few years is impressive. Literally, the last six years, we've taken ARGUS from an idea with three clients to a platform for the industry, and we've added so much more capability around that.
We believe in a stack, we believe in an industry data platform. We believe in serving the global asset management marketplace, we believe in doing that across the spectrum of our capabilities, we will keep pushing. The many of the reasons that we've been able to do this is we collected an exceptional talent on our team. I get a chance to partner and work and meet many of the other companies that operate in our industry, whether they're providing data, software, or services, we have the best team. There is no doubt. We continue to add to it, I'm proud to run with this group of talented and innovative and ambitious professionals. It's really exciting for me, really exciting to have Carl Farrell as my partner while I do that.
Listen, the opportunity going forward is there. We're in control of our destiny. We love the fact that there's many new entrants in our market. We've run past a couple of them. We know there's more coming. We remain humble. We remain focused. We wanna have a startup culture. We wanna be innovative. We wanna run. Let me tell you that we are a company that shall grow. We will make the investments to do that. We will find ourselves taking on the challenge of the most important and influential commercial real estate companies in the world. Thank you for listening. Prior to answering any questions you may have, I would like to take the opportunity to express my appreciation to our employees, our customers, our shareholders, and our board of directors.
First of all, I think I've done a pretty good job about our employees and the many people that have made significant contributions to our company. I particularly wanna thank our senior management team. We're pushing each other, we're challenging each other, and some days, it feels hard, but we always have come together. We're having fun while we do it, but it's all about the team, and I really, really wanna thank not only employees, but our senior management team. To our customers, we also express our gratitude for trusting us, for taking us into new markets, to allowing us to be with them as partners to set up business in Europe, in Asia, in Australia. This is the true test, the true testimonial. When we go into those markets, we're not ready.
We don't have what they want. They trust us to get there first, and that's pretty cool. Very exciting. To our shareholders, we appreciate your support, your recognition of the company's potential, and the confidence you've placed in us with your capital. We particularly appreciate that you come with us during these investment phases. You know, we look at this all the time. The last 2 x that we've done this, we've created great returns and incredible value. We're gonna do it again in the cloud. I thank you for your support. Finally, thanks to the board of directors. Your ongoing counsel and support has been amazing. I can tell you, as Ray said, this is not a flyby board. They have opinions. They are really amazing in shaping where this company is going. They also are ambitious.
I particularly welcome Tony and Colin. In the short time that since we've talked to you've brought a whole different perspective, and I appreciate it, and I'm so excited to have you along on this ride. Now I'd be happy to open it up for any questions. For the benefit of our online listeners, please speak directly into the microphones if you have any questions. Okay. Okay. Well, listen, let me finish by thanking Goodman. It's a great facility. I really appreciate their support, not only in today, but they've been a great service provider for many years, and I appreciate that they were able to accommodate us today. If there's no further questions, thanks for joining us today. We look forward to keeping you updated on our progress starting tomorrow.
Anyway, in the next couple of days when we release our results. As a reminder, we'll be reporting, there it is right there, Q1 2019 results tomorrow after market close. For additional information, please contact Camilla in IR. Have a great day, everyone. Please join us for a continued conversation over snacks and refreshments. Thank you very much. Thank you.