Insights

The broker is not dead, but is changing fast

From Last Word, Real Assets Adviser, May 2026 Issue

The broker is not dead, but is changing fast

Wall Street has spoken; the industry cannot ignore

by Edward F. Del Beccaro

On Feb. 12 something strange happened to the stocks of the four biggest commercial real estate brokerage firms in America. CBRE, JLL, Cushman & Wakefield and Colliers each fell between 12 percent and 18 percent in a single session — a collective loss of billions in market capitalization — before largely recovering over the next two weeks.

What made the one-day rout particularly jarring was the backdrop: Every one of those firms had just posted record revenues in 2025. This wasn’t a story about weak fundamentals, it was a story about fear — specifically, Wall Street’s fear that the very business model underpinning these giants may be approaching an inflection point.

What exactly are investors worried about? Quite a bit, it turns out — and not all of it is new.

The commercial brokerage industry was already dealing with some uncomfortable structural realities before artificial intelligence entered the conversation. For example, the profession bleeds talent at a staggering rate: somewhere between 87 percent and 92 percent of new agents wash out within three years. The agents who do survive are aging, with the average commercial agent about 60 years old.

Meanwhile, platforms such as CoStar have already done something that would have been unthinkable a generation ago: They handed clients the keys to what was once proprietary brokerage data. Vacancy rates, rental comps, transaction histories — all of it now flows directly to tenants, investors and developers without an agent as intermediary. The information advantage that once justified a broker’s seat at the table has been substantially eroded.

Structural shifts in the underlying real estate market compound the problem. Corporate America is still rightsizing its office footprint in the post-pandemic era, reducing the number of leases that require professional representation. Fewer deals mean fewer commissions.

And then there is AI, which is the proximate cause of February’s market turbulence. Morgan Stanley has projected AI could automate 37 percent of real estate tasks by 2030, with the sharpest impact falling on property research and valuations.

The cold-calling broker is an early casualty. AI tools now generate tenant leasing profiles and auto-distribute marketing materials. Sales prospecting, for so long a rite of passage in the industry, is becoming a machine’s job.

What that leaves, and what the more sanguine analysts are quick to emphasize, is the part of the job that machines are genuinely bad at: judgment, relationships and the kind of consultative counsel that helps a client navigate a complex transaction with real money on the line. The brokers who thrive in the coming decade, the thinking goes, won’t be order-takers. They will be advisers, people who can synthesize market data, model future values and help a client understand not just what a property is worth today, but what strategic choices will determine what it’s worth tomorrow.

The major national firms saw this coming and began repositioning themselves accordingly, well before the current AI moment. CBRE, JLL and their peers have spent the better part of two decades diversifying into property management, appraisal, project management, relocation services, economic consulting and capital financing. The goal was to create steadier, fee-based revenue streams.
AI will accelerate that transition. Smaller, boutique firms will follow by specializing — finding defensible niches where deep expertise commands a premium that commoditized platforms cannot replicate.

Residential real estate, for its part, offers a cautionary preview of what happens when the profession fails to adapt. The National Association of Realtors reports the full-time residential agent population has already contracted by more than 20 percent from pre-pandemic levels.

Commercial brokerages have so far held up better. Clients should come out ahead, benefiting from greater transparency, more sophisticated analytical tools and a professional class of advisers who have been forced to up their game. Whether the brokerage industry’s incumbents capture that opportunity or cede it to technology platforms and a new generation of advisory firms, is the question Wall Street was asking on that