Jones Lang LaSalle Incorporated (NYSE:JLL) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jade Rahmani: Thank you. Honing in on the margin targets of 16 to 19, your largest peer is at around 13%. And when I look at business mix, broadly speaking, Capital Markets, I believe is around 20% to 25%, HFF which JLL acquired was above that, Leasing should be mid-to-high teens, Property Management below 10%, Occupier Outsourcing, I know the nomenclature is different, but that’s maybe 10% to 12% and then there is LaSalle clearly a high margin business. So to get to the 16 to 19, when I weighted average the calculations, I get lower than that. Is the missing piece really LaSalle most likely as well as equity income from valuation — I’m sorry, JLL Technologies.

Christian Ulbrich: No not really. I don’t think that it is as simple as you just stated. We have been consistently, over the last couple of years, favoring margins over topline growth. And that obviously was not immediately visible due to the overall market environment we are in, but the underlying profitability of our platform has been growing and I think that’s also demonstrated in this quarter. So, we have been getting out of underperforming markets and closing down underperforming businesses. That’s one aspect. The other aspect is the Work Dynamics business has been increasing their margin as we forecasted now year-over-year very consistently and that is continuing to happen. So what used to be quite a strong drag to our overall profitability is becoming a much lesser drag compared to the high margin transactional businesses.

And so, the recurring revenue streams are becoming more profitable as they were in the past. And then once the transactional businesses will get a little bit more tailwind that will allow us to get back to that margin target which we had indicated.

Jade Rahmani: Thank you. I’ll have to look more closely at that. And then finally for 2024, are there any broad brush parameters you could provide, do you expect fee revenue growth to be positive? Do you expect earnings and adjusted EBITDA to be positive next year?

Christian Ulbrich: Listen, if we could see what the world will do in 2024 that would be really helpful. We certainly haven’t foreseen the turmoil of the last couple of months, but we stay very optimistic. We are prepared for every uptick. As we have stated, we haven’t chucked any people which we will need to rehire if the market is recovering. So, JLL is ready for any improvement in the market environment and so, I guess, we will see some growth, but I will not predict the size of that growth.

Jade Rahmani: Thank you very much.

Operator: There are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call back over to Christian Ulbrich for some closing remarks.

Christian Ulbrich: Thank you, operator. With no further questions, we will close today’s call. On behalf of the entire JLL team, we thank you all for participating on the call today. Karen and I look forward to speaking with you again following the fourth quarter.

Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.

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