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Colliers is a global real estate services company that helps building owners and occupiers buy, sell, lease, manage, and invest in property.
Colliers is one of the world's big commercial real estate services firms. If a company needs office space, a landlord wants to fill a building, or an investor wants to buy a warehouse, Colliers is one of the names they call. It works for both sides of the table: the people who own buildings and the people who use them.
The business runs on a few main engines. Its brokers earn commissions by leasing and selling commercial property, and its appraisers value buildings for lenders and owners. It also manages properties for landlords — collecting rent, handling repairs, keeping the lights on — and runs a big outsourcing arm that handles real estate and workplace needs for large corporations. On top of that sits a fast-growing investment management business that raises money from institutions and wealthy investors and puts it into real estate funds, earning fees for managing that capital. The investment management piece is the strategic jewel. Fee income from managing other people's money is steadier and more valuable than one-off commissions, which rise and fall with the property market. Colliers has been bulking up there and across its other services through acquisitions, buying local firms around the world and folding them into the global brand — a roll-up strategy that adds people and clients rather than factories.
Its rivals are the giant brokerage houses, chiefly CBRE and Jones Lang LaSalle, along with Cushman & Wakefield. Colliers competes by being entrepreneurial: its brokers tend to keep more of what they earn and operate with more local freedom than at the big bureaucracies, which helps it recruit talent. The flip side is that leasing and sales commissions shrink when interest rates rise and deals dry up, so the company is always pushing toward steadier fee streams. Headquartered in Toronto, it earns most of its money outside Canada, with a heavy presence in the United States and growing operations in Europe and Asia-Pacific.
Saved answer · last researched 6 Nov 2026