All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to CBRE's 2018 Investor Day. I recognize, we all recognize that the weather has not cooperated for those of you that have been coming in from out of town. Appreciate the effort that everyone has made to come in to be here today. My name's Brad Burke. I'm the Head of Investor Relations at CBRE. This is my fifth year being at CBRE's Investor Day. It's my first year being in the current capacity as a CBRE employee, and very excited to be here in my new capacity, in my new role. Oh, did I mess that up? All right. Very excited. Speaking of excitement, this is our forward-looking statement for the day. I'm not going to read this to all of you. I would ask, though, that each of you take some time. It's on our website. It's posted on the SEC filings.
Please read this thoroughly over the course of today. Very excited for that forward-looking statement. Lauren. Excited and also grateful that today I get to talk to you about more than just our forward-looking statement disclosure. I think that all of you, hopefully all of you know that our ticker is CBG and our company name is CBRE, as a reminder. The limit on having three letters for our ticker is the result of a legacy rule at the time of our IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. The good news is that the rules have changed, so we are also making a change, and starting March 19th, we will no longer trade under CBG. CBRE's new ticker will be Thanks, Lauren. CBRE. To be clear, for everyone here, CBRE is now CBRE. I think this makes sense.
We are consistently recognized as having the top brand in the industry. We're very happy to be able to better align that brand with the investing community. Here's our agenda for the day. I think those of you that are in the audience should also have a copy of the agenda on your seat. I'm not going to read the agenda to you. Just three requests. First request, please, everyone, turn off your cell phones. Second request, around 11 o'clock in the morning, we're going to have a 15-minute break. I would ask that you all help us keep that to 15 minutes so that we keep everyone on time. The third, we are going to have Q&A. I'd ask that you hold the questions until the very end. Everyone that's presenting here today will be available for questions.
If you are asking a question, please just state your name in the microphone so that the people on the webcast will know who's asking the question. With that, very happy to introduce our first presenter, President and CEO, Bob Sulentic.
Thank you, Brad. Good morning, everyone. I want to join Brad in welcoming you to CBRE's 2018 Investor Day. This is our opportunity to discuss with you the characteristics of our sector, our position in the sector, and the aspiration and strategy that we've developed in response to the situation in our sector and our position. Also, a chance for you to get to know our senior management team a little better. I know many in the room have spent time with our team, but we can move that further down the path today. I want to start by making just a few comments on the economic backdrop that we're operating against. Most of the people in the room will have your own view. My guess is it won't be dramatically different than ours. Our view is that we're in a pretty good position right now.
2017 was a very good year. In fact, most would say the best in a decade. The big economies around the world in sync and growing. We think there should be a little bit more growth this year, part of it driven by the U.S. tax reform, minor regulations in the U.S., but also the stimulus that was introduced in China in 2016, the continued cyclical upturn in Europe, both good things. When we talk about the economic backdrop as it relates to commercial real estate, everybody wants to know about cap rates. What is the need for cap rates? Our house view is that cap rates should generally be stable around the world this year, largely stable. There's some talk about the impact of interest rates on those cap rates and the fact that interest rates may push them up.
We believe given the large amount of capital that's out there and interested in investing in the commercial real estate sector, and there is a large amount of capital, believe me. The sentiment, both consumer sentiment and corporate sentiment around the world, which is positive, and the growth that I already commented on, we think cap rates will largely be stable this year. We just completed our annual investor survey. We do it every year, and I'll give you just one statistic from that survey. A year ago, 83% of U.S. commercial real estate investors we talked to said that they anticipated either maintaining or growing their investment in commercial real estate. 83% a year ago. Today, that number's risen to 88%. As I said earlier, there's a lot of capital that wants to be in commercial real estate. That's a good thing. What's everybody concerned about?
What are the economists and others that follow what's going on around the world saying the biggest thing to be concerned about is? They're saying it's a black swan event, an economic shock of some kind. What does that mean? That means they can't identify anything specifically to be concerned about. As a result, they're concerned about the unknown. On balance, I think that's a pretty good place to be. What about the sector we compete in? We think there are some really compelling things about the commercial real estate sector, not only today But on an enduring basis, and there's four things I want to point to. Everybody in the room knows we serve two big groups of customers, investors in commercial real estate and occupiers of commercial real estate, and you'll hear a lot about that in more detail today.
I want to comment on both groups. Occupiers of commercial real estate are continuing to outsource more and more of the kind of work we do. Their appetite for what we do is growing because our capability, and the capability of others, but notably our capability, is growing around the world, and that's causing the appetite to grow. We now think that commercial real estate outsourcing is something like a $100 billion business. We're $7.5 billion or so, biggest by far in the sector. A lot of opportunity for growth there. Second, investors in commercial real estate. Institutional investors in commercial real estate are putting more and more money into this asset class. In fact, since the 1980s, the amount of institutional investment in commercial real estate has grown fivefold.
That is a tremendous opportunity for our company, because when institutions invest in commercial real estate, they hire us to buy and sell the assets. They hire us to manage the assets. They hire us to lease the assets. When private owners own those assets, they often do that work for themselves. By the way, institutions trade those assets more rapidly than private owners. A really, really good opportunity for us. The third big dynamic in our sector that I think is quite advantageous is that both investors in commercial real estate and occupiers of commercial real estate are consolidating the number of service providers they use around the world. With us having the best-known brand in the sector, and by the way, that's verifiable by third parties, it's not just my opinion.
With us having the biggest input, the biggest base of clients on both sides, that dynamic is extremely helpful to us, and it will continue to be helpful to us long into the future. There's a fourth dynamic in our sector that heretofore we haven't really talked about, but we believe what I'm about to say, and we've positioned ourself in the last year and a half to take advantage of this. We believe there's more upside from technology in commercial real estate than there is downside risk associated with disintermediation. We've put a team in place over the last year and a half to take advantage of that. You'll hear Chandra speak later today, and I think she will compel you that that's the case. What's the opportunity for CBRE, given all this? Commercial real estate is an enormous and consolidating sector. Enormous.
In fact, nobody can really get their arms around how big it is when you start considering things like the amount of space controlled by hospitals and governments and others. It is an enormous sector. You look at all the other sectors out there, financial, services, energy, manufacturing, healthcare. In all of these sectors, there's multiple companies in the Fortune 100, multiple companies. There's never been a company in our sector that's been close to being in the Fortune 100. There's never been a company in our sector that's been a Fortune 200 company. We think we have the opportunity to change that. The reason there's never been a company that's cracked the Fortune 100 or the Fortune 200 is because there's never been a great company at scale, a truly well-run scale, company connected around the world in our sector. That's changing.
We're attacking that opportunity and making progress, and if you talk to our clients, and I know many of you do, I think you'll find that's the case. I want to give you one statistic to support that notion. If you went back five years, just five years, there was one client among all our clients that generated more than $100 million of revenue for us. Five years ago, one client. Today, we have 17 clients that generate more than $100 million of revenue, and that number is growing rapidly. This is evidence that we're starting to attack this opportunity to be one of the truly great companies out there on a global basis. We have an aspiration that lines up with this.
The aspiration for CBRE is to be one of the world's truly great companies at scale, one of the truly great companies at scale, and I would argue the first truly great company at scale in our sector. What's the definition of us getting there? How are we going to get there? We're going to get there by consistently delivering outcomes to our clients that nobody else can deliver. Outcomes, not great service, not great information, not great data. All of that rolled together, great outcomes for our clients that nobody else can deliver. Again, I think the evidence is starting to roll in. I talked about those 17 $100 million customers. We have a strategy for getting there. Six key elements to our strategy. I'm going to go through these, and then I'm going to circle back and give you a little more.
The first element to our strategy, not surprising based on what I just said, we will obsess over the outcomes we deliver to our clients. We will know those outcomes, and we will obsess over them. Secondly, we'll have the industry's top talent, top market-facing production talent. We've been known for that for years, but the top leadership talent as well, and the top functional talent as well, and you'll see that in big-time evidence here today with our technology team. Best talent across the system. Third, and this is an area where we're particularly well-suited to play. We will have the industry's best platform. The way I define platform for us, it's all those tools and resources we bring to bear to support our people as they serve our clients. What does that include? It includes technology. It includes research. It includes marketing.
It includes things that sometimes people don't think about, like human resources and legal. Why is that? Because when you serve large corporations around the world, they insist that you be extremely good in the human resources area because we often take on their people. They insist that you be exceptional in the legal area because compliance is a big deal for those companies. They won't work with you if you don't have that. We will have the industry's best platform, and we have the resources necessary to invest in that platform around the world. Number four, scale. We have the industry's best scale situation right now. We're the biggest. Biggest footprint, biggest geographic spread, biggest product line spread. In fact, roughly twice the size of our nearest competitor. What are we going to do with that?
We're going to have a culture, we're going to connect around the world to support the delivery of these consistent services that our clients are looking for. That's the fourth element of our strategy. Number 5, this is something we've been known for for a decade and a half, maybe two decades. We are going to be really, really good investors of our capital to support the growth of our business. What does that mean? That means M&A. We're going to continue to be really good at M&A, I'm going to talk to you about that more in a minute, Jim Groch will talk to you about that. We're going to be really good at investing in technology.
Finally, this is one that sometimes even our own people are surprised when they hear me list this as one of our strategic imperatives. We're going to be exceptional, both operationally and financially, as it relates to cost rigor. You see that in our margins today, I'll talk about that a little more. Let me circle back to some of these. As it relates to the work we do for clients and the outcome we deliver to clients, we've established an in-house team, branded it in-house. We call it our client care team. We have people all around the world, and their job is to have deep insight into the outcomes we deliver to our clients. Again, not just the service, not just the information, the data, the actual outcomes.
We turn around and use that insight to improve on the outcomes we deliver. Again, I think if you talk to our big clients around the world, they would tell you they are feeling that client care capability. We also know from this work, and this is a really good thing. We also know there's some areas we need to improve on. We need to be even more connected. We're more connected than we ever have been. We need to be even more connected, and we're working on that. They want even more creative and strategic ideas from our professionals. That's about our people. They want even better data and analytics, a lot better data and analytics, and that's about our technology capability. Again, you'll hear more about that today. I want to hit talent now. I'm going to talk about two dimensions to talent.
The first one is going to be our production talent, our market-facing talent. Starts with recruiting. As we've talked about on our quarterly calls and our annual calls for the last several years, we are running through a long-term period, several years, where we've recruited net of departures, several hundred new brokers every year, capital markets brokers, leasing brokers. What does this do? This fills in areas around the firm, either specific industry verticals or geographic areas around the firm, where we otherwise wouldn't be able to serve our clients adequately. Gives us great coverage. The other thing it does is it helps ensure every year that we're going to start with some built-in growth in revenue, built-in growth in profitability. We have a really strong capability to recruit in this company, and I'm going to talk in a minute about why. Secondly, in-fill M&A.
We have a great corporate development team, and we have a set of field leaders and line of business leaders who know how to identify and go after acquisitions that add to our capabilities. Again, you'll learn more about that today. Why is all this effective for CBRE? Several reasons. First of all, we have the industry's best-known brand, as I said. When brokers want to put their flag somewhere, they want to put it with a company whose brand will be additive, help them do more business. This platform I talked about, all these resources we have to support them, helps ensure they'll do a great job for their clients. Really important. The integrated services around the world, this is really a big one.
Increasingly, if you talk to a broker in any local market, and certainly the big global markets like New York or London, Los Angeles, Sydney. Oftentimes, the brokers today are being asked by their clients to do more services in more markets around the world. Those brokers know if they come here, that they'll be far better supported in doing that than they will be anywhere else. Finally, brokers inside our company and outside our company know we will invest in this business. Not just invest in the footprint, but invest in the resources they need to serve our clients. All of that makes it easier for us to recruit, easier for us to retain, more cost-effective for us to recruit and retain, and they can still make more money here. Even after we more cost-effectively recruit them. That's a really big point. Digital and technology.
This is our name for our technology offering. Big change over the last 18 months. That's why I'm willing to stand in front of you and tell you it's a fourth dynamic that I think will serve us well. About a year and a half ago, we brought Chandra Dhandapani on to lead our technology offering. She came from a financial institution that was extremely well-known for their technology. She was one of the most senior people there. She's come on board to our team, completely rebuilt our team, our leadership team around the world. Sandeep is one of the key people on that team. He too came from a very prominent financial services company. Chandra and Sandeep and their team are developing a commercially focused digital roadmap for every line of business we have. Now, I want to stress the term commercially focused.
Chandra is going to have a different term for it. She's going to talk to you about we don't do shiny objects. What do I mean by commercially focused? It is intended to help our people do better things for our clients. It is intended for our clients to get better outcomes. It is intended to support our ability to generate revenue and generate profits. It isn't about developing video games or shiny objects, as Chandra will say, and she'll talk to you about that today. As a result, we have a suite of 35 applications that we're using around the world and tracking the use of around the world that we think has put us in a position to better serve our clients with technology than anybody else can today. Next, I'm going to hit briefly on M&A, mainly acquisitions for us.
Jim Groch, our Chief Financial Officer, also heads Corporate Development, will give you much more on this. Our Corporate Development team is a differentiator for us. This is a team of specialists that have come from outside our company who technically are expert at acquisitions. They marry up around the world with our line of business leaders and our geographic leaders to identify opportunities that aren't just auction opportunities, that are often opportunities that are off-market and others can't find. We're able to lay down tracks in the acquisition arena because of this capability that's really hard for our competitors to do and adds to our ability around the world to serve our clients in a lot of different ways. Again, Jim will talk about some of this, but if you look at the acquisitions we did last year, very specialized, very unique.
Many of them were not subject to an auction. Many of them were because we had an opportunity in the local market through long-term relationships to bring these companies on. The next to last thing I want to hit is this cost rigor thing I mentioned to you. It is absolutely a cornerstone of our strategy. It creates resources for us, financial resources, to continue to invest in our strategy no matter what happens. I'm going to give you a number here to support this. In our 2018 budget for CBRE, we have $175 million of savings, $175 million to the bottom line that came from cost actions we took in 2016 and 2017. We entered 2018 with this $175 million benefit, we talked at our year-end earnings release about the investments we're going to make.
We can make those investments that others can't make because of this cost rigor. By the way, we can make those investments and still have the industry's best margins, and you all know that because you've been following us. That's a very big deal. The last strategic element I'm going to talk about is the other side of the top talent dimension. Oftentimes in our sector, people talk about the market-facing production talent, whether it be brokers, project managers, developers, investors, all the different types of folks we have who are market-facing producers. Really a big deal for us. Really huge that we have those. We also are equally aggressive about building the industry's best leadership team.
In fact, I would say to you, for a company that's as focused on cost as we are, we almost certainly, size adjusted, spend more money on leadership than anybody else in the industry. Why is that? Because that enables everything we do. I talked about those integrated solutions. That's driven by our leadership team. M&A is driven by our leadership team. Recruiting and retention of professionals, incredibly tied to our leadership team. Cost control. Even though we spend more money on leaders, we spend less overall because it's those leaders that are able to generate this $175 million of savings I suggested.
With that, I want to bring it all together and close by saying CBRE is on a path to become one of the world's truly great companies at scale because we are on a path to be able to do things for our clients around the world that nobody else in this very large sector can pull off. Thank you very much. Jim?
Thank you, Bob. It's great to be here with our shareholders. I'm going to cover four topics today. First, I want to level set the conversation just with a review of performance. Most of you are pretty up to speed on our performance over the years, I won't spend a lot of time on that. Second, I want to talk about how we have deployed capital into our more contractual businesses in particular, and to improve the resiliency of our company. CBRE operates in a cyclical industry. We all know that. Yet we've grown very rapidly through cycles, and our lines of business behave differently from one another. It's important to understand the intentional moves that we've made to improve our business around capital and in particular, how we allocate capital. Third, I want to talk about capital allocation and leverage going forward.
This is a topic where I know there's quite a bit of interest, and I want to speak directly to it. Last, related to capital allocation, and Bob talked about this a bit, is the capabilities we've built to successfully deploy capital into M&A, and I think you're seeing that in our results over the years. I want to give this a little more attention as well. Most of you are aware CBRE has very strong earnings growth, and on this slide you can see our EPS earnings growth as compared to the S&P 500 over the last several years. What's less appreciated, I think, is the consistency of that growth. We've had eight consecutive years of double-digit EPS growth, and we're guiding to a ninth. I also want to highlight the quality of our earnings. We didn't lever up and acquire the earnings.
In fact, over this period, we've cut our leverage by more than half to under one times net debt to EBITDA. Going into 2018, there's some noise in looking at our EBITDA margin versus our margin on net income, because we talked about the benefit from tax reform and the fact that we've reinvested those benefits back into our business. I wanted to show you kind of here, just look at net income, the bottom line in our net income margin. We have a great record on improvements in profitability over the years. We expect that to continue into 2018. Our margin on adjusted net income should exceed 10% for the first time since we started tracking our fee revenue metric. Again, note over this period, we've simultaneously improved our business mix, which can hit margin a little bit, and we've also reduced our leverage over this period.
This slide is an updated version of a slide that many of you have seen a number of times, but it illustrates our improving business mix, which has continued. If you look at the column on the left, you see our fee revenue in 2006, and on the column on the right is 2017. We've grown the company. We've grown our total fee revenue from $3.7 billion to $9.4 billion. Over this period, our contractual revenues are up about five times. Today, our contractual revenues are greater than the size of the entire company in 2006. Of course, 2006 was a great year. Mike Lafitte's going to talk more about our various components of our business, and Bill Concannon's going to go into much greater depth in the outsourcing business. Our momentum is strong in the outsourcing business in particular.
We're increasing our advantage, and the business is growing at a fast pace. Our income statement is now more resilient, and so is our balance sheet. We and others talk about leverage ratios quite a bit. Leverage ratio is not the only important metric on a balance sheet, and it's not really even the most important metric. If you look at what caused stress in our sector during the financial crisis, it was really liquidity. It was liquidity. It really wasn't the leverage ratios. Obviously, all are important. This slide gives you a snapshot of how dramatically we've improved our liquidity metrics. Today, we have about $3.5 billion of liquidity, which we define as available cash and undrawn revolver capacity. We have $200 million of debt maturing over the next five years. Liquidity and investment capacity will be further supplemented, of course, by CBRE's earnings.
Last year, adjusted EBITDA exceeded $1.7 billion. Net income exceeded $900 million. Again, our capital structure has not happened by accident. It's been a very deliberate effort with a long-term view. Some of you in the room, bankers who've been kind enough to really be very helpful over the years. We thank you for that. This takes us to a discussion of capital allocation. It's a topic that drives a lot of questions, which is understandable in light of our strong free cash flow, low leverage, and a strong financial position. We take a long-term view and start with a few guiding principles around capital allocation. First and foremost, we focus on risk. We must maintain liquidity and flexibility to sustain the company through a severe recession, and we don't view this as really negotiable.
We look at excess cash and capital capacity, and we view this as a cherished resource. We don't generally get to use that twice. It's allowed us to change our business mix and accelerate our growth rate over the years and to create incremental shareholder value, and we see a lot of opportunity to continue to do so in the years ahead. Our North Star is to maximize long-term risk-adjusted returns. For us, long term means we're considering a lot of different factors. Obviously, EPS accretion and unlevered IRRs, but also the cyclicality and organic growth rates of the businesses that we're acquiring or investing in, and the strategic implications. We also risk-adjust cash flow. Not all cash flow, of course, is created equal.
Our decisions are informed by what we call cycle-aware frameworks for our balance sheet and our lines of business. Over the years, we've developed frameworks for each of them. I think everyone here realizes it's pretty hard to predict the cycle, yet there are common sense metrics that we spend a lot of time looking at and considering. We think about them for each of our lines of business differently. To summarize what can be a nuanced topic, here we have a slide that we've attempted to show about how we're thinking about deploying capital in the context of leverage guidelines. First, this chart assumes that we have the substantial liquidity and financial flexibility in our capital structure along the lines we've already discussed.
We consider our business and our capital allocation in the context of financial leverage and the business cycle. In this chart, dark green areas mean that we're more inclined to deploy capital. White areas mean we're focused on enhancing our liquidity, building investment capacity, and acquiring less cyclical companies. We believe this framework supports our long-term orientation and will allow us to create greater value over time. Today, we believe we're in the lower right-hand quadrant of the chart. It's hard to talk about market cycle with any degree of precision, but even if you think the cycle will be 1 year, we'll go for another 5 years or so. That means we're in the last third or so of this economic cycle.
Our current leverage ratio is at 0.8, less than 1 times net debt to EBITDA. That's clearly below our long-term target of 1 to 2 times, but we are comfortable operating with lower leverage as the cycle matures. Having dry powder in a cyclical growth industry has genuine option value. We're always investing, but during a recession and in the early years following a recovery or the early years of recovery following a recession, you should expect CBRE to invest more. At the same time, we do not see negative net debt as an appropriate capital structure. If our leverage ratio approaches zero, we will prioritize returning capital to shareholders. I think that's a point worth emphasizing. Let's discuss returning capital to shareholders. CBRE has historically deployed the bulk of its capital, excess capital, into M&A. That's been a good thing for our shareholders.
Our large strategic acquisitions occur intermittently, on average every few years. As we discuss M&A and returning capital, I want to emphasize that all acquisitions, all large acquisitions we've ever done and will ever do in the future, are always measured against returning capital to shareholders. If we do not find sufficiently attractive investment opportunities, we will return capital to shareholders, even if we think we're in the later stages of an economic cycle. If our leverage approaches zero, we'll start to return capital. As we think about returning capital, our current thinking is that opportunistic share repurchases and special dividends are the most likely mechanisms. These are both highly flexible options that pair well with investing in M&A, which is intermittent. Our share price can be volatile from time to time.
The last time we saw a real major disconnect was in Q1 of 2016. At that time, we were not in a position to take advantage of the opportunity. Today, we would be. The last topic I want to discuss is M&A. M&A is likely to be the highest and best use of capital over the long term. CBRE has made significant investments in building our capacity to source diligence and integrate M&A. I believe our track record and our capabilities are differentiated within the industry. Again, I think that's coming through in our results. Our corporate development team is an extraordinarily talented group. The professionals have backgrounds or history in investment banking or education and experience typical of top investment banking groups. Assembling this talented group of individuals wasn't easy. It took us time and focus. Also, our reporting and compensation structures are well-aligned with creating shareholder value.
Many companies have M&A people reporting into operating business leaders who are typically compensated on EBITDA growth or revenue growth. Of course, neither of these account for cost of capital. Our corporate development executives partner with our business leaders. They team up. It's an equal responsibility to identify and execute great M&A around the world. The corporate development group hard lines to me globally, and their compensation is totally discretionary, and it's based on performance and judgment. Not doing bad deals is just as important for our team as doing good deals. This team is supported by a dedicated group of integration professionals as well, and they operate under our Chief Administrative Officer. Our ability to acquire and integrate investments are a differentiator for CBRE. We deploy capital into a wide variety of acquisitions, a wide variety of types of acquisitions.
The most visible are the large transformational acquisitions. Acquiring Norland in 2013 and GWS, Global Workplace Solutions, from Johnson Controls in 2015 are the most recent examples. Beyond the accretion and the IRRs, these acquisitions often redefine our competitive position. The second type are infill acquisitions. These are smaller acquisitions that fit within our existing lines of business. Finally, we make acquisitions that bolster our existing service offering, either by adding new technology capabilities, new consulting capabilities, or adding specialty expertise or services. Chandra Dhandapani will discuss a couple of examples during her presentation of M&A of businesses we've acquired along those lines. CBRE is the market leader when it comes to M&A, and this is a slide that you've seen before. We started using it late last year, but I think it's worth emphasizing again.
There have been 12 major acquisitions in our industry since 2002, the green dot in the middle represents CBRE as we've acquired companies in our industry. CBRE has won, has pursued and won five of those deals. We studied the other seven intensely but chose not to bid on them. We are super selective about how we're building our business through M&A. It's not just a size play at all. As our industry continues to consolidate, our capabilities and our reputation around M&A are a substantial competitive advantage. In 2017, we added capabilities and depth with 14 acquisitions and investments. I won't review them again individually.
To give you a sense of the types and diversity of our acquisitions, last year we acquired an infrastructure asset manager, an Italian outsourcing company, two SaaS providers that are very focused in our sector. We also invested in and helped to launch a commercial real estate technology fund. Effectively executing M&A requires focus and specialized expertise. Since 2002, the company's acquired over 120 other companies around the world. To summarize, CBRE is very well positioned to extend its lead and create value for its shareholders. We lead a services industry that benefits from strong structural tailwinds. Our approach to capital allocation is disciplined. The company has grown into a better, more balanced, and more resilient business, and we have a proven track record of successfully acquiring and integrating M&A. I'm going to turn the floor over to Chandra Dhandapani, our Chief Digital Officer.
Good morning, everyone. I've been with CBRE for about 20 months now, and prior to that, I was with Capital One for 17 years. Many of you are familiar with Capital One, and I had the opportunity there to lead, obviously technology, but several different functions, marketing and analytics, data, and as well as product strategy and operations, mainly in consumer lending, auto finance, and residential home loans. I'm glad to be here this morning. Today we're going to go deeper into technology because this is an area that we increasingly get a lot of questions about, and clearly technology is becoming more pervasive in our industry, and it's also a place where we spend a lot of our mind share within the company. I think it'd be useful for you to hear from me how we think about technology.
First of all, how we view the landscape of technology in this industry, how we think about making investments in technology, and why we believe we are well positioned to win with technology in our industry. Digital transformation, which is an oft-used word in every industry today, has impacted many industries. For the purposes of today's definition, think about digital transformation as technology that enables changes in business models, massive changes. If you think about the industries, whether it's automotive, media, or financial services, you all are familiar with what's happening in terms of changing business models. Financial services is an industry that I'm most familiar with. If you think about what we saw happening in financial services was a lot of large companies, big banks, a few years ago, wanted to become more like startups.
They wanted to have the right technology talent, they wanted to be nimble, and they wanted to invest in technology. On the other hand, startups wanted to become more like the big banks. What you see happening over time is a recognition that we need both. If you look at the best banks in the world today, they've been able to successfully incorporate technology into the products that they offer, and therefore continue to extend their lead. There are some very successful startups that have grown up in financial services as well. Before I get into specific commercial real estate, I believe there are similarities between what we see happening with technology and transformation in other industries, including financial services, and what we see in commercial real estate.
Specifically, before I share with you what is our strategy, I want to share with you how we came up with our strategy. Over the past year, we've conducted a comprehensive exercise across every line of business and our regions, really understanding what's happening in the world around us when it comes to. We've done significant data-driven research. We have looked at client feedback. We've spoken with a number of clients. We've scanned several thousand startups that have come into this industry. Putting all that together, asking ourselves some key questions. What we've done is come up with an overall strategy and product roadmap for every line of business and region in our company.
This was a comprehensive effort where we wanted to make sure that we don't just get carried away by the buzzwords that we hear, and we really wanted to figure out where we want to invest and where we want to focus. Based on that effort, I will tell you that at this time, we believe that the opportunities that are enabled by digital and technology in our industry significantly exceed the risk of disruption at this time. Oftentimes we're asked this question about digital disruption in our industry. This is something that we have spent a lot of time studying, and I'm very comfortable sharing with you that we believe the opportunities exceed risk. Having said that, we have to make sure that we are not static in the way we think about it.
We are absolutely focusing on what are the things that we need to invest in and what are the priorities for us. As you all know, there are several technology trends. This commercial real estate tech or CRE tech or property tech, if you go outside the U.S., is a word that gets thrown around a lot. I want to share with you today how we think about the technology landscape in our industry. I'm not going to go through every one of these themes listed on the slide here, but I just want to call out a few. We watch the ecosystem very closely. There is a lot of startups coming into this industry. There's a lot of VC money flowing into this industry. Let me just call out two or three examples here. First, space as a service.
What I mean by that is, as you all have seen probably, there is increasing demand for and momentum towards clients, investor and occupier clients, looking for ways to provide easy and flexible access to space without having to sign up for long-term contracts. Another word that gets used, or phrase that gets used a lot is smart buildings. For us, when we think about smart buildings, it really refers to wiring or sensoring up of buildings so that you can get real-time data on the functioning of a building so that you can optimize energy costs, you can provide preventative maintenance or provide on-demand maintenance. Another theme that's emerging very strongly is experience-based services.
I think increasingly our clients are starting to think about the people in these buildings and the experiences they need to provide to make sure that they can retain, develop, and attract the best talent they can in their industry. There's a lot of work underway across the industry about what is increasingly referred to as consumerization of commercial real estate. What we see happening is historically, the industry has talked a lot about square feet. I actually think we are also talking about real feet in these buildings, people in these buildings, and what these experiences mean to them. These are some of the themes that are specific to commercial real estate that I've listed here. As you all know, across multiple industries, there are other mega trends in technology that are starting to play out.
You hear a lot about blockchain, you hear a lot about machine learning. Obviously, a confluence of all those technologies have implications for our industry. Putting all that together, given where the world is going The way we think about our strategy, the best way I would describe that is forward-leaning yet pragmatic. What do I mean by that? Yes, the world is changing. We've studied our observations on where we think the world is going. We're very clear about what do we want to do, where do we want to play in this changing world based on who we are, what's our DNA, and we focus our attention on where we think we are best positioned to win. Changing client expectations, focus on user experience, being able to provide on-demand services.
The other thing I would say is, being a technologist today, it's so much easier to build software than it was five years ago. That's a key point as well. Given all that, what have we done? One of the things that Bob mentioned is we believe that we have to deepen our digital and technology talent, and we have absolutely focused on that. That's something that I've spent a lot of time on since I've been here. This is one of those that you can't just say, "I'm going to hire a consulting firm and be done with it." This is something we need to understand within our company, have the right talent. We scan exhaustively, but we are very selective about where we focus and where we invest.
The other thing we're starting to do is we have a very strong set of offerings for our clients. We are infusing technology. We are infusing software as a service in addition to the service offerings that we have for our clients. Last but not the least, we have a strong partnership ecosystem. I'll share with you a little more about how we work with the major technology companies around the world in thinking about how we deploy software and how we build software. I talked about digital and technology talent. I have to say, this is just a snapshot of what I would call world-class digital and technology talent that we have assembled together at CBRE. You can see the names of companies that these individuals came from. I'm sure you think I'm biased, right? Maybe I am.
I have to say, I've done a lot of job interviews, I've talked to a number of people in this industry, and I think it's fair to say that by far, CBRE, at this moment in time, has the best digital and technology team anywhere in the industry. Some of it has been through acquisition of companies like Floored. Some of it has been organic hiring. Every one of these individuals you see on this slide here would fit in just as well in any major technology company, in any major financial services company anywhere in the world. The other thing I would highlight is if you look at the dots on this page, the green dots, we have access to digital and technology talent in the major talent markets around the world. In the U.S., we are present in Dallas, New York, Seattle.
We have teams in London, increasingly in Spain. We have a big presence in India. We have a team in Singapore, team in Australia. Given the breadth and spread of CBRE, we actually have access to talent across the world. That gives us an opportunity to also get an early view into innovation that's happening in various parts of the world. The other thing I would say is Bob mentioned that I've been here just over one and a half years. Investing in technology is not something new to CBRE. This leadership team has been investing in technology. One of the things we've done over the past year and a half is really put the 35 most important technologies that we believe we have in the company that we continue to invest in and add to under an umbrella brand called Vantage.
This Vantage suite of technologies that, frankly, some of this, which I inherited when I came on board, is a great foundation for us to build on. I'm not going to go through every one of these. I'll give you some specific product examples later in the presentation. If I look at Floored, it was a high-profile acquisition for us and the first that happened after I joined CBRE. Our leasing brokers are using this product to win business. I'll show you a short video on Floored products later in the presentation, and Whitley is going to touch upon this when he speaks. Deal Flow, it's for capital markets. It's our global listing and digital marketing platform for all property and portfolio sales. It's not just a digital marketing hub.
It helps us streamline the entire transaction process by providing full coverage tracking, a secure virtual deal room, and reporting that gives us a clear view of how prospective buyers are interacting with each listing that we have on the platform. That's a powerful capability. The other one I would highlight is TOP. Don't ask me what the acronym stands for. It's a proprietary valuations platform that we use in APAC. I chose the Asia-Pacific example because we have technologies like this in every one of our three regions, and this is accessible via any device, whether it's mobile, tablet, or desktop. It serves as an automated workflow management tool for valuations with rich data and analytics for our valuations professionals. Like I said, later in my presentation, I'll show you a couple of videos of some of the technologies that we have. We talk a lot about data.
I want to show you just a snapshot of what you see on this page here is the dots are our recent Capital Markets and property management touchpoints just in one city like L.A. If you think about the expertise, the people expertise combined with the data strength that we have in key markets like L.A., like London, like New York, around the world, I believe this kind of combination doesn't exist anywhere else in our industry. We now have the opportunity to look at this data, make sense of this data, and generate further insights from this data and help our professionals differentiate themselves further. I will tell you, there's more upside from the data that we have than I believe we have leveraged so far, and we are in the early stages of further extending how to get value from this data.
I mentioned to you that we have a great technology and digital team within CBRE. I absolutely believe that we can do this all ourselves. Our approach is a blended, what I call a build, buy, and/or partner approach. I just want to share with you a little more detail about when we build, buy versus partner. I get asked this question a lot. When we believe there is a truly differentiating capability that we have the opportunity to provide to our clients and our professionals, we would like to own it. typically, if we have the window of time to build it, oftentimes building is much less expensive than buying. We build our capabilities. We now have the capability to build it ourselves. I'll give you some examples of that in just a couple of minutes. CBRE 360 is one you will hear about.
When we don't have that window of time in the market, when we see a narrow window of opportunity, we are very comfortable buying technology companies. As you know, Jim and team have a rich history, strong history of making sure that we buy the right company, and we know what we want to buy and what we don't want to buy. I've listed a couple of recent acquisitions we did last year, Floored and Mainstream. Prior to that, we had CBRE | ESI, Quorum Analytics, et cetera. The last but important point is we want to partner with the best of our ecosystem. I look at partnerships in multiple ways. I've listed three different categories. You've heard about our investment in Fifth Wall. With Fifth Wall as well as our incoming traffic, we have a front-row seat to what's happening in the startup ecosystem in our industry.
Many startups approach Fifth Wall. Many investors approach Fifth Wall, and we stay closely connected with Fifth Wall to get that view. The other thing is we are a multi-cloud environment. We work every day with major technology companies like Microsoft and Amazon, where we leverage their public cloud. They are investing a lot, and we are able to take advantage of that. Of course, we also invest in specific CRE tech companies like Stowga and Kahua. I'll tell you next what we don't like to do. Bob referred to this as the I call it the shiny object. Being in technology, I can tell you tech is cool, right? It's easy to get carried away by the next shiny object. It's an area where there's a lot of interest, and a lot of people like to treat it as a hobby.
I want to be very clear on this. We are not interested in shiny objects. Sometimes it may seem like we are not creating as much buzz about a particular thing. I will tell you, if we are not, it's more likely intentional than not. Our methodology is to work back from what our clients and our users need and look at who we are and what we're great at and apply the best technologies and talent to meet those needs and solve those needs. I talked about how we think about investing and our approach to creating technology or acquiring technology capabilities. It's not just important to say what we're going to work on. A very important thing in creating a technology is to figure out how do you deliver. What we do is bring together small cross-functional teams.
Tech is not on the sidelines at CBRE. We bring small cross-functional teams. We adopt this concept of design thinking that I'm sure many of you have heard about. If you're not familiar with design thinking, a simple way of thinking about it is you identify a problem or need by really empathizing with the needs of our customers, the users, the human beings at the other end, rather than just from a company perspective. We generate then multiple ideas on how best to solve those needs, narrow it down to a few potential solutions that we can then rapidly prototype visually and test with our users in an iterative manner. That's how we built CBRE 360 that Sandeep will talk about, and we call it a Protothon, a three-day prototype hackathon.
By placing great talent across our organization and by having small cross-functional teams, the tech companies refer to them as two-pizza teams. That means you have to have teams that are at the right size so they can have lunch off two pizzas. Otherwise, your teams are too big. It allows them to move fast and make great things happen. The point I'm making here is having that agility is key to our success. I'll give you two examples. We have an enterprise data platform that we've created now for our global outsourcing business. It went from idea to reality in nine months. Many of you work with data. You know how hard it is to create a standard data platform. We were able to get this platform stood up.
We deployed it on AWS, we have been able to bring it from idea to reality in nine months. We are using this to power client dashboards. We've been able to bring together about 15 different data stores. I have to tell you, for the first time, our clients are able to very easily see what's happening across their portfolio and create insights that they can then leverage. We have many clients that are already on leveraging this capability, and we also have a very healthy pipeline of clients who have signed up to get more of this. Another example I'll share with you is Spacer. It's an interactive tool that basically helps clients work with our workplace team and determine what type of space they need and how much of that space they need.
It's a platform that we're actually going to launch next on Monday, and we call it Spacer. It went from idea to reality in about six months. Putting it all together. I talked about why we need great talent, what we go after, working back from what our clients need, and how we work, which is agile, fast, iterative sprints. With all that, and given who CBRE is, I believe we are well-positioned because we have a globally connected architecture, which enables reuse across the company. At the same time, these small two-pizza teams enable locally nimble innovation anywhere in the world. I think we are strategy-led in how we think about technology investments. We are agile in our execution, and we have technology strategy. You'll hear Mike and Bill Concannon talk about it.
It's embedded within each line of business and every geography around the world. Against traditional competitors, like I mentioned, I believe we have the best technology team in the industry at this point. Against non-traditional competitors, emerging competitors in our space, if you look at the chart that I showed you about the talent we have, I believe we have comparable in-house talent. We also have the capital to invest. By the way, you can't just win with software. We have the ability to put together software along with the services that CBRE is well known for. Of course, we have brand scale. I believe we are well-positioned to win, and we, of course, have to sprint and make sure that we make thoughtful decisions, but I like our chances.
What I want to share with you is sometimes when we talk about technology, it's very fuzzy. I want to give you some tangible examples. I'll talk first about a product called TransAct. The reason I want to share this with you is when we talk about technology, I said we don't chase shiny objects. This is a Salesforce platform-based product that we built in-house on Force.com, and it's a comprehensive project management solution. It's a proprietary application that we developed for our transaction management and brokerage team to track and report on the status of multi-market occupier client transaction assignments that we perform globally. With this product, we can make sure not only that our teams are well connected around the world, our clients are fully informed on the status of whether it's active acquisition and disposition projects or renewals, site searches, purchase, subleases.
You think about relocations and so much more. What it does is it not only enables a great workflow, it gives you data analytics and data visualization so that when clients look at it, key decision-makers look at it, they can achieve what we call the aha moment in viewing data and making sense of that data. Next, let me shift to Floored. Dave Eisenberg is in the room here today with us. We acquired Floored, and we announced the acquisition in January of last year. I'm sure a lot of you have heard about Floored. What I want to say is bringing Dave and team on board, this was a highly technical startup team here in New York, and they had created a novel way of applying 3D visualization to commercial real estate.
I'm thrilled that this team has been a game changer for us, and Dave is here in the room with us today, and you are going to hear me talk about his baby. I'm going to talk about two products. I'm going to show you a video for those of you in the room. Basically, think about this as Floored Build. We have two products, Floored Build and Floored Plans. Floored Build is used when there is a story to be told about either an undeveloped space or a space that needs to be redeveloped.
It puts this technology, 3D interactive technology, in the hands of our professionals so that whether they are walking into a room with a client for the first time or if it's a client that has been with us for a number of years, it helps us actually help them visualize what kind of space, what's possible in that space. Some of us can easily visualize when it's described verbally. Others need to see it. This has been a tremendously powerful tool for us to be able to generate the 3D views and show clients a virtual walkthrough of what's possible. What it doesn't do is work on every lead that we do. For that, we have a product called Floored Plans.
What Floored Plans does is it can take any PDF or CAD file, and it'll enable our professionals to make some simple but very quick changes, whether it's converting a conference room into a different type of space. It helps people answer questions about how much space do I need? What are my density metrics? What kind of space would I like? Today, you can show a financial services client what kind of space they would like. Tomorrow, the same tool can be used to show a law firm what their space would look like, or a media company, what kind of space they would need. It then allows us to also convert that into 3D visualization. It uses the same 3D graphics engine as Floored Build, and it's been a very powerful tool for our professionals.
I will tell you, a lot of products and companies will claim to do some of these things, and we don't believe there is anything that's so easy to use and compare and work for our professionals. You don't have to just take my word for it. Just over the past year, we have been able to generate a healthy chunk of revenue directly from the software, more in the millions. We also have been able to have these products participate in leasing wins of over $150 million in the past year. This is a real capability that we now have in-house that we're very proud of. What I want to do next is introduce Sandeep Davé to briefly describe CBRE 360, a platform that we introduced in January of this year.
I have to say, I'm very fortunate to have folks like Dave and Sandeep on my team. Sandeep is the Chief Digital and Technology Officer for our GWS business. You will hear Bill Concannon speak more about the GWS business later today. Prior to CBRE, Sandeep headed Digital Strategy and Transformation for Citibank right here in N.Y. I remember trying to catch up with him over coffee and dinner and trying to recruit him. He was leading the firm's digital agenda across businesses and geographies globally. In that role, he helps Citi respond to digital trends and effectively compete in the changing marketplace. Prior to that, he was at Booz & Company. I talked about world-class digital talent earlier.
Sandeep has been interviewed and featured in prominent media publications, "Financial Times," "The Economist," "Wall Street Journal." He's also a regular speaker on digital transformation and technology at venues that you'll recognize, like the Brookings Institution, Money20/20, and Mobile World Congress. With that, Sandeep, I'd love to turn it over to you to talk about CBRE 360.
Thank you, Chandra. Today, I'd like to take the opportunity to not only highlight the product itself, CBRE 360, but also talk about how we developed the product and why I believe we were able to achieve something that others would truly struggle to achieve. Every industry is going through digitization. As a result, consumers have come to expect seamless digital experiences in everything that they do, and that includes the workplace. Our clients, as they seek to attract the best and the brightest, are finding it increasingly important to deliver enhanced workplace experiences. Last year, one of our clients embarked on a redesign of their headquarters building. They wanted to redo the physical space to be open and creative, and this is something we always help our clients with. This is an existing capability for CBRE.
They also want to complement the physical redesign with enhanced, seamless digital experiences in the workplace. They figured that in order to develop and deploy a next-generation employee experience, they probably should be working with some of the newest startups that are playing in this space. CBRE was at the risk of losing this business. Our response, as Chandra mentioned, a three-day Protothon, which is really a marathon to a prototype. We got together our technology talent, which is our developers and our designers, and we paired them with our client account teams. I want to pause and stress on this for a moment because this is really unique and differentiating for CBRE. World-class tech talent, coupled with a client account team that has intimate knowledge and understanding of our client's needs, preferences, and requirements. We brought the team together.
They started mocking up the experiences, paper wireframe. We ended the three-day session with a clickable prototype. We finished the session on a Friday. Monday, we walked into the client's office, we said, "Is this what you had in mind?" They responded, "Yes, this is it. Absolutely what we had in mind." They were blown away. Since then, we've been working with the client to develop the product. They go live with their new redesigned space in April, we go live with our product alongside them. Very excited to show you the product. We now have two versions of the product. One is more suited for our occupier clients, therefore large enterprises, the other is more suited for our investor clients, multi-tenant environments. Let's roll the video, please. As I was indicating, first what you'll see is the occupier version of the product.
The intention is to really simplify everyday work experiences. What you'll see on the homepage are a series of cards that do exactly just that. Such as find me an open space right now near me. As a matter of fact, help me find anything in the campus and navigate right to it, turn-by-turn directions. Share your location with your colleagues. Increasingly important as more and more employers embrace flexible work environments. Book a space and contact building concierge. This shows the experience of booking a space. On a map view, find a conference room that works, add your contacts, check their availability, make the booking. The booking is directly entered into Outlook, therefore, it shows up on your calendars. Let's look at the experience of sharing your location. Add your colleagues, add a message, share the location. Very straightforward.
The recipients receive a notification that somebody shared a location. They can click on it, navigate right to it, turn-by-turn directions. Let's look at the experience of raising a service request, which is identifying an issue within a building. Pick a category. It's too hot, too cold. There's a coffee spill. The printer is jammed. Add your location, add any details that you want, take a picture if required, submit the request. The request is directly entered into our work order management system, assigned to somebody who can immediately respond and take care of it. Delivering experience for the occupants in the building. This is the occupier version of the product. There's the investor version of the product, more suited to multi-tenant environments. There, tenants have the ability to order food and beverage from vendors inside the building. The order can be one time or recurring.
If it's a recurring order, it's triggered based on time of day or geolocation. When a tenant walks into a building, they have a hot cup of coffee tailored to their taste waiting for them. That capability, by the way, is patent pending by CBRE. Tenants also have the ability to view local news, building news, get push notifications on building events, look at building events and shared spaces within the building, book them, such as booking a fitness class or booking a shared conference room. The product can be an extension of our clients' brands, we can tailor the product to be an extension of that. This is, of course, our first phase. We've gone live from concept to launch in six to eight months' time in both of these instances. We continue to invest in additional experiences.
We continue to invest in machine learning as a back end to enrich and personalize each one of these experiences. We're very happy to launch this. Thank you for listening, and I'll pass on the floor to Mike.
Thank you, Sandeep. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. My name is Mike Lafitte, and I have the privilege of serving as Global Group President at CBRE. Today, I'm going to discuss CBRE's competitive position in the marketplace. This slide really sets the stage for my conversation today. CBRE is the global market leader across a range of services that we provide in the commercial real estate industry today. We're generally the number one player in most of our businesses, including leasing, property sales, property management for occupiers of real estate, and appraisals and valuations. Virtually every place that we play. We have a world-class client roster that continues to grow. As most of you know, we've had outstanding financial performance over the last five years.
Our scale and our diversity, both geographic and by line of business, are real advantages for CBRE and the clients that we serve. This is a snapshot of where we are today, and I'm going to expand on a lot of the themes that you've heard already today through my presentation. I want to spend some time in this section discussing our market leading position, why we have such a strong position, and why we think we'll keep extending our lead within the industry. Over the last several years, we've made a number of observations that have shaped how we think about our business. The first is that our clients are becoming larger, and they were becoming more globally focused.
Fortune 100 clients want a Fortune 100 level of execution, and they want you to be able to do it almost anywhere in the world at any point in time. The second observation is that these same clients were consolidating their service providers, as you've been hearing from Bob and others. Fewer service companies, deeper relationship with those companies, and that trend has benefited the market leaders in our space. The third observation is that clients are hungry for data, analytics, and technical expertise beyond traditional expectations. Chandra just mentioned that a lot in her presentation. This hasn't always been a data-intensive industry, but our clients have been pushing us on this one. They want subject matter expertise around their very specific needs. Whitley, in the next presentation, will give a great example of that.
Finally, this may be a bit counterintuitive, what we found is that the bigger we got and the more capabilities we added, the easier it was to take incremental market share. We responded to this in a couple of ways. First, as Jim noted and Chandra discussed, we made significant investments to add capabilities through M&A, through talent acquisitions, and through investments in technology. We're also rolling out a major new initiative in Workplace 360 that you just heard about. It's focused squarely on the client requirement, that we improve their efficiency, deploy technology, and create work environments that improve employee morale and the work experience. It's more than just the app.
The app is certainly the enabler behind CBRE 360, but it will extend our traditional lines of business in FM and in property management and all the things that we do, design build, and all those things. The second thing is our client care program. We haven't spoken about client care to this group in depth, but it's been an important initiative to deepen our relationships with our most important clients. We're seeing real needle-moving outcomes for our business as a result of this initiative, so let me give you a little bit more detail about client care. Client care is our initiative to identify our most important clients and make sure that they have a single point of contact that can advise on all CBRE services across all of our geographies.
Given the size and the importance of these relationships, these leaders, these single points of contacts, are very senior executives within our firm. This single point of contact structure is not something that exists broadly within our industry. It started in GWS, but we've expanded it across our investor lines of business. This is another differentiator for CBRE today with this program, and it is global. Coordinating with our top clients, we set quantifiable client goals, client by client. We hold ourselves accountable for meeting with those goals, and we sit down with them oftentimes two, three, four times a year to review where we are. We measure our ability to grow the client relationship, and we measure our ability to increase what we call client share, the percentage of the work that we perform for them.
Finally, we're making sure we use the very best standards across our global business in delivering these outcomes for our clients. We are constantly developing and improving our leadership on these accounts. We're making great connections all around the world and delivering KPIs, key performance indicators, that we simply have not been able to deliver on in the past. Another differentiator. There's constant improvement in feedback loops in terms of getting better and we're building the data and the information all around this. You're going to hear from Bill later on this morning, but in our GWS business, we have a team that has developed a culture of what we call dark green, and it's a mindset. Dark green status with a client.
Based upon the traditional dashboard methodology of red, yellow, green in terms of client satisfaction, the goal is to get our clients into a dark green status, which means they're highly satisfied. This comes from intense focus on delivering the outcomes, meeting the KPIs, and leading with great talent at the account level. That is all packaged together to get to dark green, where we've got great leaders, great execution, great client outcomes. We'll find those clients dark green with very specific targets in terms of the percentage of the clients, percentage of the revenue that we want to be in that dark green status. We've made great gains in that area. The results of this client care program have been impressive. Bob mentioned earlier this morning the size of our largest clients. This chart is a new disclosure for CBRE today.
It shows you the composition of our client size by total revenue, annual revenue for 2012 and 2017. As we have added capabilities through M&A and all the investments that we've made, as we've done a better job of servicing these clients, we've seen incredible response, and it's shown here. The composition of our business that's being driven by these large clients has increased substantially. A large client for us generates over $25 million a year in revenue. Back in 2012, we had 13 clients that generated between $25 million and $50 million in annual revenue. In 2017, that number increased almost fourfold to 50. What I think speaks even more to our ability to service these large global organizations is the growth that we've seen at the top of the pyramid, which Bob mentioned earlier. Back in 2012, we had just one.
Today, we have 17 clients over $100 million. Our client size and the business we're doing for these clients has increased substantially as our capabilities have increased around the world. This slide will help explain why we've seen this outcome. It shows our 20 largest clients and a business line breakdown of their revenue. Maybe a little bit hard to read. We've removed the names to protect the confidentiality of these clients, and we've randomly sorted these clients. This is real internal data based off of our 2017 financials. Again, this is a new disclosure for us, giving you more insights into this client care program and how we think. The number of dots in each of these boxes indicates the size of revenue or order of magnitude for each client within various lines of business. I'll make two observations.
The first, we're able to get more out of these relationships than anyone else in the industry. We face competition individually within these business lines against good competitors, but very few can pull it all together simultaneously across these lines of business. That's something that our clients want, and it requires us to have deep leadership in all of these products, real local expertise, and an ability to bring it all together. Ultimately, we need to be able to sell and deliver the entire firm. The second point I'll make is there's still space for us to grow with these clients. Again, this is for our top 20 clients that you're looking at. You see many gaps in this grid.
We have great relationships, but as an example, we may not be doing transaction work in one part of the world, and we're going to be very aggressive about filling out this grid to serve these clients in more places across our lines of business. Looking at this similar cut of our clients, these top 20 clients by geography. We have the same opportunity across geographies to grow with our clients. As we have expanded our ability to provide services globally, we're gaining share with our multinational clients. We've had competitors try to use a joint venture or a partner model to replicate this global footprint, and it just has not worked in our industry. The hardest part of a client relationship is oftentimes getting that very first contract.
What's great about having so many businesses all over the globe is we get a lot of chances for that first win. That gives us a beachhead to grow the client relationship, and again, this is something that is a CBRE-specific strength. As we've increased our capabilities, we've seen the large, complicated accounts, the accounts where we have a real competitive differentiation. We've seen those grow in importance as a percentage of our overall business. The chart on the left shows the percentage of our total revenue attributable to our top 50 and 100 accounts. You can see that our largest accounts have grown meaningfully as a percentage of our revenue through 2017, even as our total revenue has increased substantially. The top 100 accounts now make up almost 45% of our revenue.
The chart on the right-hand shows the industry breakdown of our top 50 accounts, both 2012 and 2017. Not surprisingly, as we've increased our capabilities, we've been able to expand and grow the industry diversity of our client base. We're less heavily weighted today in financial services, and we're seeing great growth in energy, healthcare, and consumer clients. This is great for our business mix. Growing at 13%, CBRE's growth isn't just about adding new clients. A lot of the growth has come from expanding existing relationships with our existing top clients. You can see this in the growth of our largest clients from 2012. This chart shows what you could call same store sales, that is, what is the revenue for our 50 largest clients that we had in 2012, and what is the revenue for those exact same clients in 2017.
The results reflect how we're better serving our largest and most important clients. We retained over 95% of these clients from 2012 to 2017. That'd be my first significant point here. We increased revenue for over two-thirds of these clients. Revenue from this group overall increased at 13% annualized rate from 2012. We saw that once we increased our capabilities within occupier outsourcing with the acquisition of GWS, we saw that occupier outsourcing led the revenue growth within this group of 50 clients. Even though these 2012 clients were not GWS clients at the time, we were able to increase our occupier outsourcing revenue once we bought GWS. That speaks to what I mentioned earlier. It's easier to take share as we get bigger, and we see it in these results.
The final conclusion from this, our top clients are growing, they're buying more services from us, and we're expanding the geographical footprint where we serve them. Our leadership across a number of these businesses also provides us with a great opportunity to create some synergies and create some new products and bring those to market. I'll give you two examples of that this morning. The first is what we call GIA or the Global Investment Administration business. This is the first time we've talked about this business, but it's a fantastic story. Our Global Investors business, you're going to hear from Ritson later on, house a robust accounting and fund administration business in-house, as you would expect, given the nature of their work. We were able to carve that business out and combine it with our property management business and client accounting operations within the last 18 months.
We've now taken that product and we go to market to global investment managers with a suite of back office services that really hadn't existed in our industry before. It's a money-saving solution for a non-core component of their business. The response has been incredible. We've grown the business from just a single client, being CBRE Global Investors, to 18 clients currently. You see some of the names here. We expect to generate over $80 million this year in revenue. Again, this is something we created from scratch. Just by combining pieces of this business that already existed, expanded it into our offering. These are long-term contracts, so it's a really exciting part of our business. The next example of just synergies and opportunities is the connection between GWS and our Advisory & Transaction or our leasing business. You're going to hear from both Bill and Whitley.
Many of you have heard this story before, but it's really important that we re-emphasize this point. We use our heft in our occupier outsourcing business to drive transactional revenues across the globe. The connection between GWS and A&T is extremely strong. I can just use an example. Let's just imagine that you're a local boutique leasing broker sitting in Pittsburgh, and you've got a great relationship with a multinational company sitting in New York. One day you get a phone call and you've lost the business. You never saw it coming. CBRE comes along, we take a global mandate on, and it immediately has a positive impact on, obviously, our business, market share, and revenue. Longer term, you have to think, if you're that leasing broker sitting in Pittsburgh, where do you want to work?
Probably at the company where you're a beneficiary, not a victim of this trend called outsourcing. In this illustration, you can see how an account team based in New York with a multi-market tenant will result in spreading work all across our network. Multiple lines of business will be brought in, and again, Whitley's going to bring that to life, an example he's going to talk about in a minute. This connection works both ways for CBRE, where we have a large account relationship and we drive work across the network to our individual producers. It also goes the other way, where individual producers will have fantastic relationships. They see and observe the need for clients to need FM or projects And it can go the other way, and those relationships can be turned into enterprise accounts.
When we put these pieces together, we believe we're positioned to extend the lead we already have in our brokerage business in both capital markets and in leasing. You can see the results thus far. We have taken share within both capital markets and leasing, as displayed on this slide. Within our capital markets business, it's a lot easier to actually measure this globally. Real Capital Analytics, as most of you know, produces these figures third party. The industry reports in. Chris Ludeman, our global leader, is here in the back of the room today. You can see on the left-hand chart what's happened. From 2007 to 2017, our market share in capital markets across the globe has grown dramatically. It's been a lot of hard work in connecting the dots, but we're extremely proud of our leading position today in capital markets.
Leasing is more difficult to measure because there isn't a third-party firm that's out there measuring it. It's not self-reported by all of us and our competitors. Over time, though, I think if you look at the market share story, it is very clear for leasing. Looking at our Americas business, just our Americas business on the right, you'll see over the last 10 years we've grown our revenue by 65%. If you consider rent growth in that same period of time, rent growth is about 7% rent growth year-over-year. If we had the same set of brokers doing the same amount of work, same volume, with a commission base, it might imply 7% revenue growth. We've grown this business by 65%. While this isn't a perfect proxy for market share, we think that it's a meaningful statistic in terms of the growth of this business.
A lot of this success comes down to recruiting and retention, and I'll touch on that more in just a minute. I showed you some of the statistics on the global footprint earlier in terms of our market position, this is an even more important differentiator, even within some of our lines of business, very much is the case with capital markets. This map shows total commercial real estate capital flows around the world. It's an increasingly more important part of this business. We're seeing more demand from our clients to provide global capital market services around the world. In order to do that, you need local capital markets expertise all around the world, plus a strong global leadership team to help source and execute and connect all of these dots.
This is a capability that we've been expanding under Chris' leadership, it's tied very closely to that client care program, especially on the investor side. It's difficult to replicate, it's been a component of our capital markets outperformance. Many firms claim to have a global perspective, none have the coverage and real resources on the ground in every major market around the world like we do at CBRE. We're very proud of this. I mentioned a big part of our success in the brokerage business is because of our ability to attract and retain top talent in the industry, you've heard that this morning. We've spoken before in general terms about our recruiting results, today we want to give you some additional detail.
The chart on the left shows our recruiting results from direct competitors over the last three years in the U.S., which is where we have the best data. The first thing I'd point out is the number of producers that we've hired in both Capital Markets and Leasing is well above those that have departed. That's not the whole story. Not only are we recruiting more than those that have departed our firm, the new producers are higher-producing professionals than those that are departing. Of those that have left in the U.S. over the last few years, 22% of those were on a performance improvement plan that required that they improve their results. Additionally, our retention rates for our highest top 250 producers is extremely high in terms of retention rates, with only 6% of the departures coming from this elite group.
Our top professionals can make more here and have more resources available to them. The retention rates are extremely high. The chart on the right shows that our recruiting gains are positive when compared against both our largest competitors and the smaller boutique competitors. What's notable, though, is how much more we're able to gain headcount share from those smaller boutique brokerage firms. Similar to the story I just told about Pittsburgh. That's the part of the market where our competitive advantage is the strongest. You see that in our recruiting results and the success here. What we also see is that the people we hire on our platform are more productive once they get to CBRE.
What we experience when we hire a new brokerage professional is their first-year revenue at CBRE is typically lower than their historic volume as they close out deals on their old platform. That's very normal. What's interesting and what we find is that in years two and year three, they begin to generate more, often substantially more than they were at their prior firms. We see this all around the world. This growth in production is seen both in the Capital Markets side of our business and in the Leasing side of our business. When we ask why, these are the things that get listed. It's our global scale and our ability to do the transactions all around the world. It's the platform that you heard about. It's our market intelligence and research that is extremely deep.
It's these client relationships that we have that can break the tie. It's the network to network that we have, a lot of relationships around the world, and these offices connecting and driving transaction volumes, and that increases the lift for these producers. It's extremely important for us. A lot of these factors are difficult to replicate, but what's really hard to do is put it all together in one place. This creates an environment where our producers can consistently outperform, and it is a big factor on retention. This is my last slide. We feel a tremendous amount of momentum. CBRE is in a great place right now relative to momentum. We're able to create synergies between our business lines that is differentiating for CBRE relative to our competition.
We're focused first on client outcomes, our priority of tracking and retaining the industry's top talent simply leads to market share growth. As a result of everything we've discussed today, CBRE is able to win business that most of our competitors cannot. That's particularly true when we're competing for business from the large, complex global clients. Now I have the pleasure to turn it over to Whitley Collins. Whitley, if you'd come join me. Thank you very much.
Good morning. My task this morning is to try and tie together a number of things you heard this morning, from Bob talking about how we've scaled the platform and given our brokers more weapons at the point of sale to help them win, help them deliver better outcomes for their clients. Talk about what Chandra talked about with respect to investments in technology and how are we using that at the point of sale. As Mike talked, in the changing business, there's definitely much more focus on an account approach, but there's still a lot of large one-offs that our brokers go out and compete for. The example I'm going to give you here is an actual example that happened last year. It's a case study of a pitch we made, the finalist against us was a boutique firm.
I'll tell you that ultimately, the way this decision was made, you'll see it really was an unfair fight. At the end of the day, the tenant, based on their needs and based on what was important for them in the decision criteria for their real estate partner, there was really no question. What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you that in the event we compete against a bigger competitor, how a situation like this, how we would differentiate ourselves in something similar. Give you the example. This is a large one-off assignment in Arizona. Going to keep the client confidential. Situation for them, they had 480,000 square feet in six locations. They had done some mergers and acquisitions over the last 10 years and left them with six locations of all different space.
They owned three of the buildings, they were leasing three of the buildings. Again, the space was not just obsolete, but it was a mishmash of a whole bunch of different companies. That was their real estate situation. They needed to figure what to do. How could they consolidate everybody and get them into one location? Just as important in their process of trying to decide what to do on the real estate side was dealing with these business issues. These issues that are up on the screen are ones that we are frequently encountering with most of our clients. I'll take the second one first. It was an outdated culture. They feel as if their business has been done the same way for 30 years. The talent, their employees, continue to age. They're trying to recruit, attract, and retain the best talent.
number 1 is really a big factor, is how can we compete better for the best talent? Are we in the right location in Arizona? Do we have the right facilities? Increasingly, facilities are a criteria for companies as they look at the best way to attract and retain talent. Then the last 2, pressure on costs. We see that a lot with companies. Pressure on costs and constraints on capital. That was a big issue here because the clear option was going to be to consolidate 6 locations into one place, and there would be a required investment to make that space the right location going forward. Based on that real estate situation, based on these factors, what it came down to was this discussion. These are actual slides from the presentation.
This was an agreement we had in the first 20 minutes of the presentation that based on that situation, these are the expertises that you would need moving forward. The question is, you get all that from one firm or can you do what a lot of firms have done historically is have your local broker do something and then partner with a number of other capable resources. Our competitor here was a local boutique. They had a long-time relationship with this company, doing basically traditional transaction work. Go through the situation here. Lease negotiation and disposition. That's your typical brokerage business. That's the leasing business. That was a given that that would need to be done. They own 3 buildings. Clearly they were going to sell one, two, or all three of the assets and potentially buy something new.
It is uncommon that a broker that is really good in leasing is also good in the investment sales side of the business. Number 3, labor analysis. They really hadn't done a study on the labor really since, well, period. They're looking now at the entire market, not just in their current location, but surrounding markets, surrounding cities, surrounding states on where was the best place to get the talent they wanted, the best access to the talent, the lowest cost, and the longest horizon for that talent. Incentives analysis and negotiation. They, like a lot of the companies now, are aware that there's billions and billions of dollars now being offered up by states and municipalities for these jobs, for companies that will bring jobs to their markets. For states and municipalities, they're actually keeping jobs there in their markets. Build-to-suit.
It was clear in this situation, in this market, there was no one option that would be the right solution for them to consolidate. Likely that it was going to be a build-to-suit opportunity. As I mentioned before, rare a leasing broker has great capability in leasing, sale, and build-to-suits. The reality is 1% or less of the brokers out there have actually done a build-to-suit, let alone ones that have an expertise in it. Construction and move management. No matter what they did, there was going to be a large assignment if the building was built to build out their internal space, hire an architect, hire the contractor, manage the consolidation, and then ultimately move over 1,000 people into one location. Transaction structuring. Lease accounting changes, new tax laws. The CFO in this particular case was riveted on existing and planned assets.
What's the best way to have it on their balance sheet? The last one, office space strategy. It's a company that really has not addressed this. There's an aha moment in this presentation that we're seeing increasing in assignments like this, where the C-suite said, "We're actually designing space today for people that are 18 to 20 years old. This is going to be a space that we're going to build out for the next 15 to 20 years. We're actually designing space for people today that work very differently than our aging workplace." That focus on what do we do, how do we think through the strategy going forward was really important. We took that agreement on what they needed, and we created this checklist. As I said before, really, in this case, was an unfair fight.
Basically, we filled this out with them in the presentation. The reality was the boutique firm had been providing just the lease negotiation and disposition services since the beginning of time for them. The reality is they had a choice. Do we go with that boutique who we have the relationship with and then partner with all these other capabilities? Or do we go to one firm that can do all of it? We're increasingly seeing this kind of criteria on the account side, where companies are looking for multiple services and multiple geographies. In complex one-off assignments like this is now the bar. I mentioned before, not a fair fight here. In the case where we compete against our larger competitors, how would we still differentiate ourselves?
Here's what it comes down to is every one of these now, a bigger competitor may check all the boxes. Ultimately it comes down to going through each one line by line to see who's got the competitive advantage. Let's talk about that, this ties together a number of things you've heard this morning. Lease negotiation and disposition, that's our Advisory & Transaction business. Mike showed you, we've been a dominant player for the last 10 plus years in leasing transactions. Property sale and purchase. We're the market leader in investment sales. No one's buying and selling more real estate than we are, and particularly in this market. Labor analytics. This is not a group. This is not one or two people. This is a business we've been building for the last 20 years. It's a group of 30 professionals in Arizona.
All they do now is analyze the top cities in the U.S. for labor, access to it, the cost, the longevity of it. Incentives analysis and negotiations. Business we've been building over the last 20 years right next to our labor analytics group. These are professionals in markets all around the country that are negotiating with states and municipalities now on the economic packages to attract these jobs and negotiating with states and municipalities to keep people in their market. Build-to-suits. Who better to help a client think through the opportunities and the challenges of build-to-suit than the number 1 developer in the country? We have that with Trammell Crow. Trammell Crow, in this situation, will be the advisor helping model the build-to-suit.
Ultimately, if they end up deciding to do a build-to-suit, nine times out of 10, what the client will do when we recommend that they bid it out, send an RFP, they'll ask us to formally pitch that business. Construction and move management, project management. We are the largest project management firm in the world. This year, I think our estimate is $80 billion on behalf of clients. That's real buying power with architects and contractors in helping them make this decision. Transaction structuring. On the back of our investment sale business, we've built a corporate capital markets business. These are investment bankers that can sit down with a C-suite and help a CFO think through all the different scenarios and ultimately understand the best way to put this real estate on their balance sheet. Do they lease? Do they buy? If they lease, what sort of lease structure?
Workplace strategies is one I want to focus on. Workplace strategies, to me, is an area that we're absolutely a market leader. We're a market leader in workplace strategies, not just because of the work we're doing with our clients, and we're doing more work with clients, look at the Fortune 200, helping them think through their office strategy, but we're also doing it ourselves. Many of you know that we've been transforming our own portfolio over the last four years. We are taking a workforce from basically having dedicated space in offices and workstations with file cabinets to a free address environment, paperless. This is a major transformation. There's a lot of change management that's involved in this. This is a journey that our clients want to hear about. I'll tell you, everybody is selling workplace, but we're doing it. We're living that journey.
The reality is, free address, paperless is not for everybody. The reality is everybody, every company is considering some sort of a journey, some sort of change management. If they're going from here to here, like we're doing it, we can help them through that journey. If it's just to here, they're not going to maybe go free address, but they're going to go paperless. How do you teach your employees how to work differently? How do you get them excited about being in that space? One of the examples we use in this presentation, and we use a lot, is this is an example. This is our Los Angeles office. What you see up there is 15 different ways our employees have a chance to work every day.
This group that was in the same space for many, many years basically had three ways to work: an office, a cubicle, and a conference room. Every employee, every day comes in, they have a decision. A lot of our older employees will go to the same location or work typically the same way. Many of them are starting to venture out. Our younger employees love this. Every space is open every day. Nobody has any dedicated space. We're giving people a choice, and the whole goal here is to make them more productive, more efficient, enjoy working in this environment. Next example, Chandra talked about Floored, and I can't tell you how powerful this is. Again, this is something that's proprietary for us.
In this presentation, what we did was we took an actual floor plan of theirs, an actual layout of theirs, as Chandra said, he's loaded this up. It's one thing to give somebody a general capabilities presentation in a meeting and tell them generically what something does. Everybody leans in when you bring this up on the screen. This is their space. What we did is we took their space and a handful of six or seven ideas that they had, and in real-time, we modified the space. It could go back and forth to what the space would actually look like. If you look at this as an eight-person conference room, you want to change it to 12 or 16 or 18, you go back to the floor plan, you change it real-time. Those views, that gives you an idea, that's Arizona.
Those are actual views outside the window. Powerful tool. If you just look at the workplace strategies and the Floored piece of it, that is always the number one thing on people's minds in a presentation. They want to know about workplace. This is about a big transaction ultimately, but they want to know that the workplace, the work environment, helping them think through that is a fastball for us. Talking about our own journey that we've had ourselves in transforming our workplace, bringing tools like this with Floored, just a game changer. The last few slides I have for you, as an example in the space. This is the way I communicate the capabilities we have and this competitive advantage we have to our clients and to our professionals. Occupier activity life cycles. Think of it this way.
Every one of our clients for every facility they have around the world is in one of those four phases. Go look at the slices of the pie for a second. Transact, build, manage, or plan. They're in one of those four phases all the time. Brokers business forever is basically set out right where the transact pie starts is when they're ready to do a deal, the brokers business historically has been ready to do that deal. The reality now is our clients have needs after they do a transaction for building, managing, or moving their space. When they're managing their space, that's our core outsourcing FM business. The planning. Increasingly now, our clients are thinking more two, three, four years in advance about what to do with single locations and portfolios.
The big thing now they're expecting from us in that planning phase is help us think through what to do and when to do it. If you see the example I just gave you, the slices of the pie we used in planning. It was workplace and change management, labor analytics and economic incentives, corporate capital markets. Over in the transact side, we used our investment sales expertise. Then in the build, we used the development from Trammell Crow. A handful of slices in that particular example. What I tell our occupier clients is, any problem you have anywhere in the world, we can solve it. The last thing Mike talked about, expanding the relationship. Increasingly, our business now is awarded on an account basis. There's still a lot of our business, more than half of our business, that's awarded on a one-off basis.
There's clearly a transaction or there's an account opportunity here with this client. Our job here is to do a grand slam, hit a grand slam home run for them on this one project. Get them to look differently at this process, get them to look differently at the decision-making process, and then ultimately migrate this relationship into an account relationship. One that gives us all the transaction work, all the project management work, economic incentives, get them to think differently about all the money that's available with states and municipalities, and to make that a systematic evaluation in their portfolio. Development. There will be other development opportunities, not just this location in Arizona. Capital markets. They own other assets, a lot of other assets. Helping them think through the disposition and acquisition strategy with all those assets. Workplace strategies.
They're already asking us right now as we evaluate the workplace situation for this headquarters. They're already thinking about rolling this strategy out through the entire portfolio. That leads to occupancy management, a real new focus for us. Companies now want you to track every seat that they have available, every body. They want analytics inside their space. What space is being used the most? What time of day? What people are in the office? What time of day are they in the office? To help make the space even more efficient. Lastly, facilities management. Thank you. Brad, we're taking a break?
Thanks. Let's take a break.
All right, everyone. Hello? Hello? Hello? All right, let's get moving. If we could have everyone begin to move back to their seats, it's appreciated. All right. We're going to get started with the second half of our presentations today. Happy to introduce Ritson Ferguson, CEO of our Real Estate Investment Businesses.
Thank you. Thank you, everyone. This is an interesting opportunity for me as an investor. I'm used to sitting on that side of the microphone and asking the questions. I'm delighted to be here this morning to talk to you about CBRE's two investment businesses. These are two world-class businesses that represent businesses where we invest capital on behalf of our clients, and often are investing CBRE's capital alongside those clients in these businesses. CBRE Global Investors is our investment management business. Trammell Crow Company, which Whitley mentioned earlier, is our development services business. Collectively, these two businesses delivered about $214 million of adjusted EBITDA to CBRE shareholders in 2017, or about 13% of the total. The synergies between these two investment businesses are significant and are growing, as I'll talk about later in the presentation.
These are also two businesses that provide a great source of investment opportunities for CBRE's capital, and as of the end of the year, represented businesses where CBRE had invested about $293 million of its capital, earning very good returns, as I'll demonstrate a little bit later. Let me turn first to the Global Investors business. CBRE Global Investors is a performance-driven business. We've been in business since 1974. We have a 45-year track record of delivering outstanding outcomes to our clients. With $103 billion of assets under management, we have a sizable presence in every part of the globe. We have over 750 people in 31 offices in 21 countries. A theme you've heard consistently about CBRE is the advantage of the global presence, and I'll talk about that a little bit later. 75% of the assets under management with our business are private real estate investments.
We also have about $15 billion of listed or publicly traded securities in the real asset space, real estate, and infrastructure securities. Last year, we expanded the growth potential of our platform by acquiring a majority stake in Caledon. Jim mentioned it as one of the many. That was a non-marketed deal and one that we were able to source and close with the help of Jim's capital markets team all on our own. We are probably best known for our core and core plus strategies. This is consistent with the trend in investors' appetite. We made a strategic decision to grow the breadth and depth of our value add strategies, and as of the end of the year, those comprised about 10% of our total AUM.
We serve about 500 institutional clients, we serve literally tens of thousands of clients if you consider the individual investors in the mutual funds that our securities business, CBRE Clarion, manages. Bob mentioned this earlier, I want to emphasize that we believe the growth opportunities for CBRE Global Investors are benefiting from, and will continue to benefit from, the secular growth of investors' appetite for alternative asset classes. Real estate and infrastructure are the two largest categories and allocations within a typical investor's allocation to real assets. We are benefiting from our ability to serve clients' needs there. As you can see from this slide, the allocations to real estate alone, just that one piece, have quintupled over the last 36 years.
We also believe, as I mentioned earlier, that we are benefiting, and will benefit into the years ahead, from investors' preference here later in the cycle for strategies with less risk in what we call core plus capabilities, which plays to our strength. Performance is our mission here at CBRE Global Investors. If you go into any of those 31 offices, you will see these words on our conference room walls. It is what defines us and drives our strategy. Keep in mind, we manage about 177 different strategies. I'm presenting some new disclosures to you today, summarized accordingly to try and help me give you a quick report card on how we're doing. As you can see, overall, we're doing well. 79% of the assets under management for which we have a strategy-specific benchmark have been outperforming over the last 5 years.
Our AUM within that private real estate category is a little bit higher at 82%. An example of a strategy in that space would be US Core Partners, our open-end core fund here in the U.S., which is literally the number 1 fund over the 1 and 3-year period in a category that is a popular investment vehicle of choice for investors desiring U.S. core real estate. In our Global Investment Partners business, which is a leading provider of global solutions, 85% of the assets under management are outperforming their benchmarks. Global Alpha Fund is our flagship fund there. It's a global core plus fund. Global Alpha, as you can see on the slide, against all open-end funds in the MSCI IPD Global Property Fund Index, we've outperformed on a property-level basis in the last 5 years. Our strategies at CBRE Caledon in the infrastructure space have also exceptional performance.
About 85% of the AUM there is outperforming the strategy benchmarks. In our securities business, CBRE Clarion, the performance is only at 66%. The margin of underperformance is relatively small. We put some significant effort into that, and I'm happy to say that with the work of our quantitative investment research team there, we were able to make some important improvements, and last year in 2017, 80% of those strategies outperformed the benchmark, including in our listed infrastructure space, where our mutual fund offering through Voya there is a 5-star Morningstar-rated fund. As a result of delivering strong performance and solutions that are timely for clients' needs in this real asset space, we grew our AUM impressively last year, 19%, or up about $16 billion from where we started the year.
We started with $87 billion in assets under management, which by the way, would have been about $12 billion higher if not for the negative FX moves. Remember that in our business mix, more than 50% of the assets under management are in EUR and GBP denominated. We were facing some strong headwinds in the last 3 years. Nonetheless, from that $87 billion, we added about $7.7 billion from the acquisition of CBRE Caledon. Most of the growth came organically, $29 billion, to be specific, $17.5 billion of that new capital from new capital raised, and the deployment of dry powder into investments that we found compelling. Another $11.4 billion came from positive market movements, and finally, from some positive FX movements.
I would point out that this strong growth in AUM, 19%, came despite the fact that we have been very active sellers as any active manager with a cycle-aware approach to the market, something Jim talked about earlier, needs to be to drive performance. We're happy to be able to deliver performance, be disciplined sellers, as we expect to continue to be, and still drive this impressive AUM growth. 2017 was a record year for our capital raising at CBRE Global Investors. We raised $9.9 billion for our non-security strategies, which is double the level of capital raised in 2013. Half of this new money came to our separate accounts, which are the individually customized mandates we have for some of the largest and most sophisticated institutional investors around the world. The balance came to our commingled fund offerings.
About $3.2 billion of that to our core plus fund offerings, like US Core Partners and Global Alpha that I mentioned. We were also successful in raising $1.5 billion for our expanded list of regional value add strategies and really across all three regions. Again, good testament that our strategic priority is generating some momentum. Two strengths of our global platform are our ability to raise capital across borders and also for global strategies. 30% of the money that we raised last year, $2.7 billion, was cross-border capital, where we are helping investor clients in one part of the world find solutions in other parts of the world. $3.3 billion or a third of the total capital we raised was for global strategies, which is an acceleration of a growing trend, and I think something that plays to a unique and differentiating capability of our platform.
Only $300 million of this $9.9 billion was raised for infrastructure. That's something that I expect to change. Our infrastructure investment teams have identified, as you see on this slide, some $400 billion of infrastructure investment opportunities or needs over the next five to 10 years. It's a global asset class. As you can see here, it encompasses projects in energy infrastructure, utilities, renewables, transportation, telecommunications, and a growing list of public-private partnerships. We believe that the need for infrastructure investment will outstrip the capability of traditional government funding sources to meet this need, and we expect a growing component of the capital for these projects will come from the private sector, both from listed companies and from unlisted investors. This bodes well for our ability to grow our infrastructure AUM from the current 7%, 8% of our total. Let me turn to the second of our investment businesses.
Trammell Crow Company is what we call our development services business, and it is the leading U.S. development business. That's not my opinion. That's been recognized. Commercial Property Executive magazine has ranked Trammell Crow Company the best U.S. developer for four years in a row. Last year, in 2017, we got the NAIOP Developer of the Year award for this outstanding business. Trammell Crow's in-process pipeline is about $6.8 billion. As you can see from the pie chart, it's well diversified by property type. These are all projects in the U.S., but they are across a wide geography and multiple markets. There's another $3.8 billion of pipeline projects that Trammell Crow has identified. These are to be in the pipeline. These are projects that have an identified capital source for funding the equity and have a greater than 50% probability of happening in the next 18 months.
The total of $10.6 billion, impressive. That is up about 65% from the $6.4 billion of pipeline and in-process in 2013. That comes mostly from enhancing that pipeline of downstream deals. Importantly, too, we have been able to grow our roster and the depth of our equity partner list, shown here at the bottom. As you can see, some very impressive capital partners, including a growing relationship with CBRE Global Investors that I will come to here later. Our development services business has grown because it too has delivered exceptional outcomes for its clients. To give you a sense of that, we have looked at all projects commenced after the global financial crisis and completed. And at this point, on some $2.7 billion of projects, we have delivered a 32% net realized IRR to our capital partners.
That is on over $1 billion of capital, and that is net of all fees, including the promotes paid to Trammell Crow Company. Very satisfied clients, exceptional returns, and I am happy to point out also exceptional returns earned for CBRE shareholders because we have provided between 5% and 10% of the capital on all these projects. Investment returns are only one way the development services business delivers revenues for CBRE and for its shareholders. I have developed this slide. Sorry, let's go back. I developed this slide to give you a little bit of an indication of the ways in which our development services business generates revenues for CBRE. On a typical 350,000 square foot spec office development with total budget costs of about $100 million, our equity component would be $35 million. 90% of that is provided by our capital partner, and up to 10% is provided by CBRE.
We have earned about $2.1 million of fees from development and from tenant improvement oversight, but another $16.9 billion comes from return on investment and from the promote income generated from CBRE's role as developer. For those of you keeping score at home who want to know how this shows up, we have provided a footnote at the back that talks about these last two categories of revenue, co-investment return, and promoted interest showing up in unconsolidated income and recognized as cash flow from investments. There are additional revenues not shown on this slide that are worth mentioning, too. This type of project would typically generate some $3 million or more of revenues for CBRE for the brokerage services and transaction services that they provide to a project like this. There are real synergies between our development services business and the rest of the global business at CBRE.
There are also growing synergies between the two investment businesses themselves, this will be my final slide. Trammell Crow Company has acted as developer on an increasing number of projects currently either just completed or in process. We have four projects with total costs of $220 million. These will deliver 2.4 million sq ft of mostly industrial space. I have pictured one of them, King Mill Distribution Center in Atlanta, that represents a recently completed project for one of our global industry separate account clients, where we realized returns very much consistent with what I talked about earlier on that slide of completed returns. On the strength of that outstanding outcome, we are on to phase 2 with that client and with Trammell Crow.
We are executing on our goal of incorporating Trammell Crow projects in more of our global investors' mandates, where it meets our global investors' clients' demand for these type of investment solutions. It's also consistent with Trammell Crow's objective to expand its roster of capital partners. We're confident that Trammell Crow's pipeline will generate sufficient Deal Flow for its list of capital partners, including global investors, as a growing participant in that. These two investment businesses also share research and some capital raising services for additional cost synergies and efficiencies in providing those shared services. To a point that Jim brought up earlier, these are also two exceptional businesses for providing co-investment opportunities for CBRE's capital.
We have a single approval process, a very robust process for approving and evaluating the risk management of those incremental investments that are all kind of coordinated from both global investors and Trammell Crow Company through a mechanism that reports to me and ultimately to Jim and Bob. We are excited about the growing list of investment opportunities within both of these investment businesses, and I look forward to answering your questions later. I'll now turn the stage over to Bill Concannon to talk about our occupier outsourcing business.
Thank you, Ritson. I think I lucked out here this morning, got the last slide of the day. Hang in there with me. You can tell how much our leadership enjoys talking about the business that we run. The business is really answering three questions, three important questions. Big questions, important questions. What is GWS? What do we do? How do we make money for the company? Talk about growth. Why are we seeing demand for growth in this business? We've appreciated good growth in the business, but I think that growth, we may see even accelerate from here, and I want to talk about that. Then the third is the competitive landscape. We compete with different companies across this global landscape, and I want to get into some detail about the competitive landscape as we see it.
First question, what is GWS and what's our business model look like? To answer that question, I want to go to this slide because it explains what we actually do, what we do as a company. What we do is we take over the management and the administration for the real estate for very large corporations, governmental agencies, and hospitals, but primarily large global companies, their real estate holdings, whether they're owned assets or leased assets. We generate all of our revenue through three business lines. You heard Whitley and Mike talk about A&T, Advisory and Transactions. Project Management is the second, and Facilities Management is the third. A key point here is that GWS, you can see the numbers up there on the slide.
It's a balanced and diversified revenue stream, and it's balanced and diversified around the world in the three regions in which we operate, the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. That will continue to grow. The business is organized in a way that our clients really like because there's high levels of accountability for the way we organize. They basically understand how our company maps to them in all of the decisions we undertake on their behalf. The first business, top left there, Advisory & Transaction Services, it's about a quarter of our revenue. The bulk of that revenue gets reported to property sales and/or leasing in our business. External reporting, the bulk of it gets reported there. As you heard earlier, this is where there's great synergies. Great synergies between GWS and our brokerage businesses around the world.
That's something we really work hard on, and we really build very hard into the business. The way we do this is we contract with a corporate client through an MSA, what we call a Master Services Agreement. Underneath the MSA, it sets in place the scope of work, the service level agreements, where we will have portfolio managers manage the process to out to the field brokerage professionals for buying, selling, leasing, subleasing, renewals, strategy, and that's the way that model works largely. There'll be some process professionals, portfolio managers, you call them on site using all the tools that Whitley talked about, Chandra talked about, and that's what drives this A&T business. The way the clients look at it is they may have dozens and dozens of transactions in a year, maybe as many as 100. Property sales, renewals. They have an MSA with us.
They don't have to have a bake-off. They don't have to make a decision around every transaction that comes up. They have a contract with CBRE. We manage that contract. We certify the professionals in the field. They get a consistent process. They get great performance. The people in the field get to know those assets, get to know those leases where the execution and negotiation takes place. That's A&T. Project Management, what we do, I think you heard thousands of professionals all around the world, a very big business, about a quarter of our revenues again. This is ground-up development where we don't co-invest. There's some development activity, program management, tenant finish out, renovations, move add and changes in the headquarters, lots of activities like that. Again, very big business.
We get paid here either as a % of project costs or like a consulting firm would pay based on the resources and staff assigned to that account. That's how we get paid in project management. It could be a program for a year or two to do a signage, or it could be a three or five-year contract, and it's very synergistic with our tenant rep business because, again, we're doing a tenant finish out on a global leasing. In Facilities Management, again, it's over half our revenues. This is a very sticky business because it's five-year contracts. We take over the workforce. We're providing the building technical engineering services. We're providing all of the activities around the recurring HVAC, the electrical, the power, the plumbing, and so forth.
It's a business where we self-perform a great deal of the activities, but we also subcontract soft services like janitorial, waste removal, cleaning, landscaping, snow removal, things like that. That's in our supply chain. We'll take accountability for it, but it's not something CBRE self-performs. But if we're providing technical services at a data center, he or she at that technical data center is going to be a CBRE employee. That's where we end up staffing and playing very closely. Our ability to self-perform in literally 100 countries gives us a real advantage on this technical end of the business, and that's a strategy we've built since 2013 very successfully. We're also on the supply chain side, we're very invested in building a world-class supply chain in our FM business because Bob talked about outcomes.
We're bringing a total outcome to the client, whether we self-perform or in the case of subcontracting. In the very bottom there, you see consulting and analytics. I'm really glad it came up a few times today. This is a real differentiator for the business that we contract with our large corporations, enterprise data platforms, organizational efficiency, portfolio optimization. The tools we bring to them help them make really, really good decisions around that. The technology stack that we've talked about really enables that as well. Okay. That's what we do. Here's how we do it. This is a kind of an organization chart of a typical normative corporate real estate department. The first thing you'll see is the head of real estate reports about half the time into the CFO.
We've done lots of research on this, about 45% of the time. It really signifies the importance of the financial end of the real estate thing. Half the time, they're reporting to the CFO. The other half of the time, it's someone else in the C-suite. It's a very unique delivery model that we've put in place. It's unique for our industry, so I wanted to take a minute to go through it. The key to this is that account manager shown under A. B, C, and D report to A in our model. They report into the corporate real estate leader. This is an individual that's a great communicator, that, as I like to say, has a PhD in CBRE. They're very objective. They're very trusted. They're strong communicators. They know our system. In addition to that, they know the client's business.
They're relevant to the client's industry. They're really working hard with our field professionals. Their job is to make the day-to-day decisions, but they have extensive roaming rights around the world to execute on behalf of the client as their partner, as their trusted partner. That's how we do it. These next three slides I want to go through very quickly just to give you a picture, maybe it comes alive. This is a U.S. client, headquarters in Los Angeles. They have data centers. They have regional offices. They have retail stores. Our account manager sits out in Los Angeles, right? We only provide A&T in this case and FM, not projects. They're responsible for making sure the FM at every property, it's going to be delivered differently at a retail store than it is at a headquarters.
It's going to be differently at a manufacturing site than it is a data center. Different staffing, different service level agreements, all of that. That's a picture in the U.S. of one client. Have to organize around that. That's the same client now with the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. You see their opportunity to drive value back to the corporation has been enhanced by working with our partners in EMEA and Asia Pacific. Once again, coverage is key, and we have the coverage. We worked really hard to build the coverage, 400 offices around the world. Understanding the business of the client's business has become really important and a big differentiator over the past several years. Basically matching up the talent at the account level back to the client has become very, very powerful.
Now you take that picture and multiply it by 500 clients around the world. These are the locations that we actually map to around the world. Think about the supply chain, think about our technical know-how, think about our real estate advisory, our project management staff, as you think about the competitive landscape that I'll talk about a little bit later. This is a source of competitive advantage for us. It's how we organize. You can see 28 million people we have to care for that show up in these buildings every day when they go to work. We do that through our own GWS employees, but we also do it through a very close partnership with the real estate advisors around the world, project managers around the world. Okay. That's a bit about GWS.
Now the growth question, where's this growth demand coming from? I wanted to really take a minute to give you a different view of this than I have in the past. This is a look across an organization. Some you've heard a little bit today about what's on the CFO agenda and the CEO agenda. This is kind of where we live in terms of the value proposition, but also in terms of the demand drivers in this business. The CEO knows that we work with-- They know real estate's the second or third largest cost that they're dealing with. They absolutely know it's not a core competency of the corporation. They're focused on building a world-class culture. I mean, you listened to Bob earlier today talk about the culture and the plan for CBRE to become world-class.
Those are the people that want the same thing for their large organizations around the world. They want real estate to be a competitive advantage, and it starts with the cultural change. That's a tailwind for us. There's no doubt about it. CEO's office in our business is a tailwind. CFO, they're looking for predictability in spend. OpEx cost, CapEx cost, lease cost, no surprises. Up there, you see proven solutions that reduce total occupancy 12%-15%. When we come to solution these large outsourcing deals, we're able to do that. That's a big area of competitive advantage. Procurement leaders over the last five years have taken a very formal seat at the table. Many times, they partner with the real estate department when we're actually going out and bidding on this business. Procurement is trying to manage a very good process.
They're glad we're at the table, we're a large, very competitive, sophisticated company. They like us at the table. Many times, these processes are championed by procurement departments inside these large organizations. Corporate real estate, we've spent 30 years building relationships with corporate real estate. They're being asked to do more with less. They're finding that their direct reports, their staff, is actually better housed, better employed with a service firm like CBRE. Then you see HR and IT. Whitley had a beautiful case study there about how big the change this company was trying to drive through workplace. HR is at the table. IT is at the table in a big way. Their partners. IT does not want to allocate capital to spend on a CMMS system or a work order management system.
They expect CBRE and companies like ours to come to the table with the technology stack. We're able to do that. That is a tailwind for our business. These are demand drivers. They're not going to go away, we feel very good about the fact that the acquisition of JCI GWS a few years ago, we really capitalized on that acquisition to make this change to this value proposition. This is a slide really to talk about the levers of the growth in the business, not at the account level, but across the business of GWS. It's really very simple, very straightforward. This is a sticky business, so turn is a big deal, right? Baxter signed a contract with us 28 years ago. In 2020, it'll be 30 years managing their headquarters out in Chicago and in their facilities around North America.
They continue to be our client. It's a turn business. The renewal of this business is very, as long as you execute. ExxonMobil, you see there. Once we acquired JCI GWS, they hired us for A&T. They hired us for project management. They actually ticked the box for geography as well. ExxonMobil, great new client, much larger than it used to be. They have expanded their services around the world with CBRE. IBM. IBM is a client in one geography. More recently, they've hired us in Latin America in 10 countries down in IBM. Not a lot of companies can execute for a company like IBM in a place like Latin America across 9 or 10 different countries. Industry sectors. We have advanced in new industry sectors that frankly have opened up to outsourcing. Life sciences is an example. So as manufacturing. You see Abbott Laboratories there.
Abbott Labs, phenomenal company. Late to the table to use outsourcing as a management tool. They've been one of many life sciences companies that is now using outsourcing as a management tool. Then Walmart, we're growing into big box retail. Retail has now firmly put their toe in the water to look at real estate outsourcing and at the way, once again, of managing their cost in a predictable fashion. The next slide is really something that Mike touched on, this is our top 10. A through J is GWS's top 10 clients. Right? We've covered up the names, removed them so that there's no issue there. We provide them array of services in different regions.
The bottom line here is you can see our market share, even with our top 10 customers that are all very, very large around the world, isn't 100%. The rest of the 490+ averages about 30%. We have a phenomenal opportunity to grow within customers. Again, Whitley's case study brought that to life with multiple services that we provide. When you think about the growth, where is the growth coming from? The tailwinds from the C-suite, the ability to grow within existing business. That's why we enjoy over 40%, almost 50% of our growth every year comes from the expansion of satisfied existing customers. Mike talked beautifully about our client care program. That client care program is a very, very integral part of what we do as a business in terms of our executing for client set.
This is the last question, the competitive landscape. You may remember this slide from last year, the size of the addressable market we marked here at $140 billion. I'll just make two points here because the actual size is unknown. It's a bit uncertain. The first point is, you can see it's very, very large. It's a very significant, and it's largely under-penetrated market today. We're a $7.5 billion business. We're the largest in the market. I just showed you the top 10 clients where we don't have 100% market share. The next group averages about 30%. It's a very large and under-penetrated market, and we're taking share, and we're growing well, and we're competing hard. The second point is that we know the pie itself is growing.
When CBRE invests in firms like JCI and Norland, what we do is expand the share of the pie by taking on building technical engineering services. The pie itself, because we're now able to provide more of the supply chain itself. The second part of that is that real estate portfolios of these companies are growing. They're undergoing M&A. They're undergoing change. This is a big under-penetrated market that we're very focused on. The last point I'd just make there is the companies out there competing in this competitive landscape as a managing agent are not going to compete effectively. This is how the competitive landscape shapes up. I want to show you where competitors sit against the familiar backdrop that I've shown you already. The first is, these are the full-service providers. I hope you can all see this.
This is CBRE, JLL, and Cushman & Wakefield. They are global. They're full service. They show up with an account type team model. All of different sizes and capabilities, but when we go to the market and we compete for a global RFP that is full service, we'll likely see this group. That's this group. No more. When we go to the market and the market wants just a transaction RFP, just a transaction proposal, not a one-off, but a contract for transaction management, portfolio management services, we'll see these firms. Colliers, Savills, Newmark Knight Frank. They will have maybe a little bit of project management. They won't be deep in FM at all. That's who we will see in a competitive landscape there. When we compete just for an FM.
A lot of these clients, when they go to the market, they want one service just in the U.S., trust the service provider, and then grow it over time. I think Mike made that point well. These are the companies, including the building services companies, that are primarily janitorial firms or catering firms that want to upsell integrated facilities management. We'll see these firms from time to time. Project management, a big business for us. These are the kinds of firms we will see, Turner & Townsend and Arcadis, Mace, and a few others that are local, very local, or perhaps regional. This is who GWS sees when we go to market. There are others, but these are the primary players. The final is these real estate owners that are playing in the agile space. Sean talked about it, the WeWork, the Regus, the Industrious type firms.
These are firms that we see. Obviously, you've heard with great excitement our discussion on CBRE 360 today. We're not sitting still. We're playing in the experience end of that, but that's who you would see underneath an Advisory and Transaction capability for CBRE, for GWS. Last slide. This is something we're focused on very deeply. It's how we think we're differentiated given what I just showed you. We're full service, and we're global, and we can integrate, and we have tremendous tools and growing infrastructure to compete at the high end of the market, at the integrated end of the market, at the global end of the market with all the tools that you heard about. Number two, the global platform provides scale and leverage, and that's what our clients are looking for.
We are seeing more and more of an uptick on clients coming to the market for more global solutions. That's an absolute trend. The deep experience and track record you've heard about all day across the business. It's been 30 years since we've been investing to be world-class in this business. We've had a long history enabled by Bob's leadership, Jim Groch, Mike, and others, where we've stayed the course on this GWS business. That in itself is a competitive advantage. Finally, this focus and investments around digital and technology and innovation. Every one of our clients expects innovation. They expect us to see around corners for them in their core business. The more we're able to bring these types of applications to the market, bring solutions, then we feel like that's a strong level of differentiation.
That's playing out in the market. I'm going to turn the podium back to Bob to lead us for Q&A. Thank you. Okay. Brad? Okay. Okay.
All right. Mitch Germain, JMP. I think the last time you guys updated us on the
GWS business is about $110 billion. I could be off. Now it's $140 billion. What's causing that increase? What are the factors in your mind that are causing the increase in the size of the business in general?
I think what I was trying to say at the end, Mitch, was think about it just from the point of view of Norland. Previous to Norland in the U.K., that wasn't in our number, right? The soft service providers aren't in the number we are quoting. We're not quoting janitorial, we're not quoting landscape, we're not quoting snow removal. We're not quoting things that isn't in our purview to self-perform. What we have chose to self-perform has changed dramatically in the last five years. That is a very big deal to this industry. That's really important. I'm so glad you asked that question. CBRE stepped through a door five, six years ago with the help of our board of directors to say, "We're going to self-perform hard services, highly skilled technical services." Today, we're managing 800 data centers, right, with technical skill.
That's changing the size of the market, our customers are growing. The industry is growing through those mechanisms.
You talked a little bit about broker recruiting. I was wondering, I think you cited your brand, your scope, your scale as an advantage in maybe increasing the broker production as a reason why they would come to you. Does that tend to manifest itself in an upfront bonus or as a lower split on an ongoing basis?
We pay our brokers full splits. We don't attempt to do anything other than that. Where that set of circumstances manifests themselves is this becomes a more attractive place for a broker to come to. We're generally able to make a more attractive deal from our company's perspective up front, yet the brokers still do better between the upfront amount they get and the downstream earnings they have. They're extremely focused. These good brokers, these good intel acquisitions are extremely focused on the financial circumstance they'll experience over the life cycle of their time with us or a competitor. It's a tremendous advantage for us that we're able to put them into a system with our outsourcing business, with our A&T business, with these other things, with all the things in our principal businesses.
Ritson's business between development and investment management generates a lot of work for our brokers. Our network around the world allows a broker to sit in their city and do business around the world that they couldn't otherwise do. The financial circumstances for our brokers is exceptionally favorable here over the lifetime of their time here. We're able to more effectively recruit and retain the brokers as a result.
Jade Rahmani, KBW. Have you seen any impact on deal pipelines from recent interest rate volatility? Also, have you seen any indicated changes in cap rates on the part of investor underwriting?
We have our Global Head, Chris, would you come up? Global Head of Capital Markets, Chris Ludeman, here, and I think he's best positioned to talk to us about that.
Actually, quite to the contrary, we have a very active deal pipeline. We're pitching more than ever. I would say that when we've seen these rapid rises in the 10-year, we've had now three of them in the last several years. There's always a chance for some price discovery there. We've also seen the cost of capital and those spreads on the debt side kind of contract. We haven't seen a meaningful move in cap rates as of yet. Total cost may be modestly increasing, but remember, we have this tremendous wall. I think Ritson talked about the allocations to both debt and equity around the world. We haven't seen those diminish in any material way. In fact, we still see them increasing, so that cost or that wall of capital is counterbalancing the issues that you mentioned.
I'll just add to that within the investor community, we see allocations to real estate and real assets generally still increasing, despite the fact that those asset classes have delivered some exceptional returns over the last several years.
Thanks. Tony Paolone, J.P. Morgan. Going back to the idea of self-performing, where do you draw the line in terms of what's attractive for M&A? Do you like Sodexo or ISS's businesses, or how do you think about where in the food chain you want to be or where you stop?
We're not going to be buying any janitorial firms. We really have drawn the line here to now around hard services. When we say hard services, we're talking about building technical engineering services like Norland, power, electrical, HVAC. That type of business. There is a time coming that we think AI will play a bigger part in this business, right? Smart buildings are coming, that means smart equipment is coming. More tech-enabled M&A that enables more of an on-demand field solution around our FM business is coming. That's not drawing the line like a Sodexo or a large janitorial firm or something like that. Does that help?
It's Stephen Sheldon from William Blair. Within GWS, I think you said, I think within the top clients, you maybe had on average 50% market share, and I think 30% on average for your overall base. I guess, who holds the remainder of that market share? Is it JLL and Cushman, or is it one-off providers? As you're trying to expand market share within clients, how does that sales process work? Is that you guys actively pursuing that or are clients coming to you and asking you, "Can you give RFPs for expanding the relationship?
To the first question, a lot of it's still in-sourced. Particularly, I've used the IBM example. Latin America, it was in-sourced. It was first generation. There's still a lot of first-generation outsourcing to come. Even with mature outsourcing companies in emerging markets, that's still to come, right? Emerging markets like in Eastern Europe or in Asia Pacific, it's still to come. I think that we still have work to come from clients that are currently in-sourced, we do win our share head-to-head where clients haven't been satisfied with a competitor, right? It's all of the above, it's typically a journey over time where you build trust up. They see the investments we're making, basically, they're trying to reduce, as Bob said early today, they're definitely focused on consolidating the number of service providers. What was the second question? I can't remember.
When you're trying to move market share up within clients, is it you trying to proactively sell to them or clients coming to you and asking, "Can you provide this?
We live with them every day. It's very collaborative. We know where they're having problems with a competitor in another market. I'd say we're always coming with them with ideas. We're always coming with them with the new innovations we're developing, it's collaborative.
Hi, Steve Sakwa with Evercore ISI. I guess this one's probably directed to Ritson, just on the development front, I know it's not a huge piece of your overall business, just how have you guys thought about that business as we're getting pretty deep into the economic cycle and what are the commentaries and feedback you get from customers, how have you sort of changed maybe the risk appetite on that business as we get deeper in?
Well, Steve, it is an impressive business. Last year it contributed $120 million of adjusted EBITDA, that's substantial. I talked about the growth in the combination of in-process and pipeline, one thing I didn't call attention to is that it's been a fairly stable level of in-process for the last three years, we think that's appropriate, that's not by accident. That's on purpose. Later in the cycle, you want to be careful about that. The enhanced pipeline has also taken on more and more fee revenue as opposed to speculative development. Again, I think that's appropriate for late cycle. The other piece, because you're implicitly asking a question about risk as economic cycle kind of continues is, the Trammell Crow Company principals experience themselves.
Many of these are the leading developers in their kind of geographies for the last several decades, they've been through a couple cycles, they have learned from that how to be very cycle aware. We've imposed on top of that, as I mentioned, an approval process for co-investment and vetting deals that come onto the pipeline that again, is very careful about analyzing risk in light of where we are in the cycle.
I guess I'm just trying to really figure out what's maybe changed in your underwriting criteria. Is it slower rent growth? Is it more cushion on the construction side, bigger contingencies, kind of longer lease-up cycles? Are there any kind of big changes or are any of those things impacting the clients that are coming to you?
Well, all of those things are variables. The interesting thing is lately, we've seen kind of an acceleration of the realization trend. Many of the projects that come onto the pipeline are anticipated to take three to four years to mature. We've had a number of projects, particularly in categories like industrial that have accelerated. The lease-up and therefore the ability to fully realize and return capital to our capital partners has actually accelerated recently. We don't see that kind of slowing down as we look forward in the next 12-18 months anyway, so as we're kind of looking at the pipeline.
David.
Thank you, David Ridley-Lane with the Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Maybe a question for Jim. When you think about your IT spending on the OpEx line, you feel like you're fully funded today at this percentage of revenue, that should be fairly stable over time? You know it's probably gone up over the last couple of years. Do you feel good about the ZIP code you're in there?
Well, I would say we have continued to increase spending, at a pace that's very rational for our business. We're fortunate to have a large business, some of these things that you see us doing, it'd be the same investment if we were a company that was 25% our size, or if we were ultimately twice our size. We have an advantage in that front that we can spread that cost over a great area. Second thing is we've tried really hard not to spend beyond our capability, we realize that these things are hard to do. They're hard to execute, obviously with Chandra coming on and her building her team, we have the expertise to deliver more, we're still taking it at a measured pace.
I think you might see some modest increase, but it's rational and it's kind of baked into what you've seen from us in the past few years as well.
If I could add just a little one on the CapEx side. You've done a couple of technology transactions on the M&A side. Yeah.
Is your willingness to invest greater today than it has been in the last few years?
You're talking about CapEx or M&A?
I kind of view it as a same bucket.
Yeah. It's an area we've been investing in for the last handful of years. Clearly, as we have more capabilities, our confidence around execution goes up, that enables us to do more.
Thanks. You mentioned technology being a net opportunity for the business and laid that out. What are the areas that you see as being either potentially at risk of disruption or where you have to maybe perhaps change things the most to either defend them or even de-emphasize a piece of the business because you just see it as being disrupted long term?
Tony?
I get this. Chandra and Paul Steitz is our Global Head of Strategy back here. The two of them last year undertook a detailed study of all of our lines of business, in fact, the components of our line of business by revenue to answer that exact question. Chandra, why don't you come over here in the middle so they can see on both sides?
When we started this exercise, there were some questions about, we looked at every line of business in every region. What is the EBITDA contribution? What are we seeing as trends for that particular business? I would say, for example, let me tell you one of the prevailing concerns or questions was about the valuations business and say, "Is this an area that's ripe for disruption?" As we studied it, we see tremendous opportunity even in the valuations business that at first glance you may look at it and say, "Okay, is this all going to be AI automated?" We actually see tremendous upside there, and we have more demand that I think we can meet with better automation, machine learning, and data that we have. That's an example I would give you.
We study this in every line of business, and we're very careful when we say our opportunities exceed risk, and we always qualify based on what we have seen up to this point, right? We're continuing to study the landscape, at this time, we are more bullish about what we see ahead of us, which is the demand that we are seeing from our clients, whether it's experience services, whether it's aggregation from a supplier perspective or other tech-enabled services that we're looking at.
Thanks. It seems like if I look at hiring or M&A, you can quantify a return on capital over a period of time. How do you measure return on capital when it comes to technology investments?
That's tricky, right? It's like quality. How do you measure return on capital quality? Chandra, why don't you talk about how you think about that?
Yeah. Typically, technology investments, if you look across industries, right? There are some things that are keeping the lights on, you have to make sure of, and there are other things that you can measure either in terms of revenue enablers or cost efficiency. We adopt a similar approach where there are some things that are table stakes, we have to keep the lights on. When we make our capital investments, usually it's very much in link with a business strategy. We can say, is this going to impact For example, I talked about flow. We look at how is that impacting our ability to win at the point of sale. We talk about when we deliver software as a service, we are able to measure what is the revenue from the software that we are creating versus what we have spent on it.
I think it's a little bit of an early stage in this industry to think about technology as a revenue enabler, we are seeing that, and I think it's going to continue. At the same time, Bob talked about cost. We can clearly measure. Cost is easier to measure. When you apply technology and you see efficiencies, you can see the cost come down.
I want to add to that because everything we do where we invest capital as opposed to invest with our income statement by foregoing current earnings, we have rigorous underwriting processes for. Jim, you ought to talk about that because we apply it whether it's CapEx, co-investment in our principal businesses, M&A, all of it gets a rigorous process. Jim, you want to get what we do there?
Different kinds of investments require a different approach to the analytics to look at the investments. We start with the assumption our cost of capital is plus or minus 10%. We do look at different cash flows differently. If we're looking at an acquisition that's a modest size acquisition, we'll usually put a 50% discount right off the bat to a terminal value because we think there's risk as you've got talented people there as to whether or not you can keep bringing people up as those folks retire, et cetera. On a technology-like deal that Chandra mentioned, we'll have very specific analytics about how we're going to get a return on that technology deal. Sometimes we'll have a lot of debate about what are the right analytics to measure to make sure that we're then chasing after the biggest opportunity with that investment.
Is it selling more of a service that a technology company acquired? Is that the primary metric, or is that half of the metric we're measuring and the other half is the adoption rate within our brokerage workforce, and the win rate, because we know a little bit of an increase in win rate and high adoption rate can have an exponential return. We want to make sure we're trying to measure the right targets. Everything we're doing, we're looking at what's the return on our capital.
Jason Green, Evercore ISI. Just curious, with the record numbers of funds raised for alternative investments, if beyond interest rates stabilizing, there's a certain economic condition that some of your clients are looking for transaction volumes to pick up?
Maybe Ritson and Chris should both talk about that. Why don't you hit it, and then come over to Chris?
I'll speak to kind of the collective demand. Again, I mentioned that we are a business that has kind of grown through time and is best known for its core plus solutions.
I think as we get later cycle, one of the natural things is for investors to say, "Am I being forced to take more risk to achieve a certain level of return?" I think what we've seen is, late in cycle, some of the benefit of people saying, "I don't want to commit the error that was committed last cycle of kind of chasing return and then bringing on more risk." That said, our enhanced return strategies, I think, have been getting good pickup because we're again emphasizing taking real estate-related risks depending on our platform's capability to underwrite certain markets, and where we may be kind of taking some leasing risk or something like that. Within a window of kind of 18-24 months, where we think we can underwrite the real estate-related risk as opposed to doing platform-related or highly leveraged strategies.
We very much kind of pulled back from use of more opportunistic strategies and high leverage given the cycle, and I think that's appreciated. The cycle-aware concept is playing very well in terms of ability to kind of garner new assets and new mandates.
Quickly, I would say, I would've expected a lot more vocalization around core capital placement. The issue that we really have is when we have a core offering in the market, we've got one now that was built with Ritson and one of his team and one of the partners that you saw on the screen. When we've got a core offering of size, we've got a wide and deep bidding pool. Challenge is the industry doesn't have enough of those core offerings to take to the market. What I have seen is continued interest in value add. I would say a dial turn to more light value add as opposed to heavy value add or opportunistic. A tremendous amount of capital looking at those opportunities.
The other thing I would tell you is they're looking for them in a broader spectrum of places. Not just in the gateway markets, but they're looking at 2nd-tier markets and sometimes in tertiary markets. That's one of the great benefits of our platform, is we've got very wide distribution, both domestically and globally around the world in these markets.
Thank you, everyone.