A 108-year-old brokerage that started managing Manhattan skyscrapers now moves $9.4 billion of real estate advice a year - and quietly runs the buildings you work in.
In October 1917, two brothers-in-law named J. Clydesdale Cushman and Bernard Wakefield opened a small office in New York and started managing other people's buildings. The city was growing straight up, filling with new towers full of tenants and elevators and boiler rooms, and someone had to keep them running. That was the whole idea. More than a century later, the firm they named after themselves manages roughly 5,100 million square feet of commercial space and earns about $9.4 billion a year - and most people who walk through its buildings have never heard of it.
Cushman & Wakefield is a commercial real estate services firm. That phrase does a lot of quiet work. It does not mean the company owns skyscrapers or hoards land. It means the company sits in the middle of nearly every decision made about commercial property - who leases the office, what the warehouse is worth, how the tower gets financed, who fixes the elevators - and takes a fee for the advice. It is one of the industry's "big three," alongside CBRE and JLL, and it operates from about 400 offices across 60 countries with roughly 52,000 employees.
The simplest way to understand the company is to follow the money. Cushman & Wakefield earns brokerage commissions when it helps a landlord fill space or an occupier find it. It earns commissions again when investors buy, sell or refinance a building through its capital markets team. It charges fees to appraise and value property. And it signs long-running management contracts to actually operate buildings and corporate portfolios - the engineers, the front desk, the maintenance, the energy bill.
That last category matters more than it sounds. Transaction work - leasing and capital markets - rises and falls with the property cycle. Management and services work is recurring and much steadier. Roughly half the firm's revenue comes from that recurring services side, which is what lets a brokerage survive downturns that flatten pure deal shops.
Cushman & Wakefield serves two broad kinds of client, and they usually want opposite things. On one side are occupiers - the multinational companies, banks, retailers and government bodies that need space to work in and want the most of it for the least money. On the other are investors and owners - the pension funds, landlords and developers who own the buildings and want the best possible return.
The firm advises both. A tenant-representation team negotiates a lease down for the occupier; an agency-leasing team negotiates the same kind of lease up for the landlord. Its clients span office, industrial and logistics, retail, multifamily housing, data centers, life sciences and healthcare - which is another way of saying it has exposure to almost every way modern space gets used.
Approximate share of revenue by service line, illustrative.
The firm packages its work into a handful of service lines. Agency leasing and tenant representation handle the deals to fill or find space. Capital markets covers the sale, acquisition and financing of property and portfolios. Valuation and advisory supplies the appraisals used for transactions, lending and financial reporting. Property, facilities and asset services run buildings day to day. Global occupier services bundles facilities, transactions and projects for large corporate tenants. And project and development services handle design, construction and fit-out.
Increasingly, a lot of this is data and consulting work - workplace strategy, location strategy, portfolio optimization, and a growing ESG and sustainability practice that advises owners on energy, decarbonization and green-building standards. The buildings still need boilers fixed; they also now need carbon reports.
When Cushman & Wakefield was founded in 1917, the Empire State Building did not exist yet - it opened in 1931. Co-founder J. Clydesdale Cushman was serious enough about the craft that in 1922 he published a book on how modern business buildings are operated, effectively writing down the firm's methodology. The company grew through the century, and in 2015 the modern group took shape when DTZ, Cassidy Turley and the Cushman & Wakefield name were combined under a single brand.
In 2023, Cushman & Wakefield did something unusual in the property-brokerage world: it named a woman as chief executive. Michelle MacKay had joined the firm's board in 2018, become chief operating officer in 2020, and was promoted to president and COO before taking over as CEO on July 1, 2023. The path from director to CEO is rare, and MacKay has since spoken publicly about the advantages a former board member brings to the top job.
The firm went public in August 2018, listing on the New York Stock Exchange at $17 a share and raising roughly $765 million. Before the IPO it had been backed by private-equity owners including TPG and PAG Asia Capital, who have since worked down their stakes. Today its headquarters sits not in its native New York but at 225 West Wacker Drive in Chicago.
Commercial real estate services is a scale game, and the firm competes at the top of it against CBRE, JLL, Colliers, Newmark, Savills and Avison Young. The advantage of being one of the largest is coverage: a global occupier with offices in 30 countries can hand its entire portfolio to a single firm that can lease, value, manage and rebuild space in all of them. That breadth - and the recurring management contracts that come with it - is the moat.
It also means the company is a fairly direct bet on how the physical economy behaves: how much office space companies keep, how fast warehouses fill to serve e-commerce, how many data centers get built, how investors move money in and out of property. When those trends move, Cushman & Wakefield feels it early - which is exactly why its advice is worth paying for.