CBRE is a commercial real estate services and investment firm headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with roots going back to 1906. Beyond brokerage and property management, the company runs project management and research groups whose data sets are widely used to size construction demand. Its North American Data Center Trends report has become a reference point for contractors tracking that sector: the first-half 2026 edition put vacancy, measured as power capacity available for lease, at a record-low 1.4% even as new construction rose almost 25% across major markets. The same report recorded Atlanta overtaking Northern Virginia as the continent’s largest data center construction market. CBRE also owns Trammell Crow Company and its residential arm.
The firm’s origins are older than the brand. The lineage runs back to a San Francisco commercial real estate business founded in 1906; the CBRE Group name only arrived in 2011, and the global headquarters moved to Dallas in 2020.
Dallas was not a cold start. CBRE has worked the North Texas market since 1970 and keeps offices at 2100 McKinney Avenue in Dallas and 301 Commerce Street in Fort Worth, so the headquarters relocation landed on top of a fifty-year local presence rather than replacing one.
Scale is the defining feature: more than 155,000 people across upwards of 600 offices in over 100 countries, serving close to 90 of the Fortune 100. The 2006 acquisition of Trammell Crow Company was the step change, adding development and project management depth to what had been primarily a brokerage and services business.
The company organises into four segments, being Advisory Services, Building Operations and Experience, Project Management, and Real Estate Investments, and the service lines beneath them are what most contractors actually encounter. Investment and capital markets advisory, leasing and occupier services, design and build, property and portfolio management, business transformation consulting, and investment management each touch a building at a different point in its life.
Design and build and project management are the two that put CBRE on a construction site directly, often as the owner’s representative rather than the owner. The remainder shape demand rather than delivery: leasing decisions and portfolio strategy set what gets built and where.
The Lipsey brand survey named CBRE the top global commercial real estate brand for a 24th consecutive year in 2025. For contractors and consultants the more practical consequence of that position is informational, since a company advising on that share of the world’s commercial space accumulates a view of where capital is moving well before it shows up as permits.
