Emma Giamartino
Chief Financial Officer at CBRE Group
Thanks, Bob. At a consolidated level, core EBITDA was in line with our expectations, as slight outperformance in REI and lower-than-expected corporate costs offset margin under-performance in GWS. Advisory SOP performed as anticipated. Core EPS exceeded expectations due to a one-time tax benefit.
Please turn to Slide 6 for a review of the Advisory segment. Despite an interest rate outlook that steadily worsened throughout the quarter, Advisory net revenue rose 3%, consistent with expectations, bolstered by its first quarter of transactional revenue growth in six quarters and growth from every line of business except property sales. Leasing revenue rose in every region and global growth exceeded our expectations. Office leasing grew by double-digits globally, as a resilient economy and progress on return to office plans have embolden tenants to make occupancy decisions. We have continued to see strong momentum in U.S. leasing in April.
Financial services companies are leading the recovery, with active demand up more than 20% year-over-year across U.S. gateway markets, reflecting their considerable progress in bringing employees back to the office. Tech companies continue to lag, with demand 50% below pre-COVID levels. Globally, property sales revenue declined 11%, with weakness in the U.S. and APAC. EMEA is showing early signs of recovery, with sales up 8% year-over-year, where growth was led by the U.K., where property values have made more progress towards resetting as well as Spain.
We saw strong growth in our loan origination business, despite continued weak property sales activity. Our growth was driven by loan origination activity and escrow income. Loan origination fees grew 16%, primarily driven by a heavier weighting of higher-margin loans sourced with debt funds. Escrow income is de-minimis in a low-interest rate environment, but acts as a hedge in the current economic environment. We saw this in Q1, when escrow income increased nearly three-fold from Q1 2023.
The remaining businesses within Advisory, property management, loan servicing and valuations, together, grew revenue by 5%, as expected. For the full year, we expect these businesses to deliver low-double-digit revenue growth, led by property management, particularly as the Brookfield office assets are onboarded beginning in Q2.
Moving to Advisory SOP, I'll call out two one-time impacts that weighed on margins in the quarter. First, we experienced elevated medical claims that should reverse later in the year; and second, we trued up interest income owed to a small number of clients. Absent these one-time costs and excluding OMSRs, margin would have improved 25 basis points versus the prior year Q1.
Please turn to Slide 7, as I discuss the GWS segment. Net revenue rose 10%, in line with our expectations. Facilities management and project management net revenue were up 11% and 7%, respectively. Project management faced a particularly difficult comparison as net revenue surged 18% in Q1 2023. We had a second consecutive quarter of very strong business wins, with a healthy balance between new clients and expansions. As of the end of Q1, we already have commitments for nearly $900 million of anticipated net revenue growth, representing the significant majority of our projected growth for the full year. Having already locked-in this much of our expected growth, gives us confidence in achieving our full-year revenue plan.
SOP margin on net revenue declined by 90 basis points from the prior year Q1. More than half of the decline reflects a one-time impact to gross profit margin from the same unusually large medical claims we saw in advisory. The remainder is related to two areas of higher costs. First, we've made investments in certain initiatives that we are discontinuing. Second, our operating expenses have crept up over-time, as we've expanded into new sectors, entered new geographies and added redundant costs related to recent M&A. In response, we were taking a fresh look at GWS' cost structure and are already executing substantial actions across the business. The benefit of these cost actions as well as our elevated new business wins will be apparent in Q3 and, particularly, Q4.
Please turn to Slide 8 for a discussion of the Real Estate Investments segment. This segment's significantly lower earnings were slightly better than we had expected. As we previously discussed, last year's first quarter benefited from an unusually large gain on a development portfolio, while project sales activity remains subdued in the current higher cap-rate environment. The value of our development in process portfolio increased by $3 billion to $19 billion in total due to the start of a particularly large fee development project.
Investment management performance was in line with expectations and below the prior year, largely due to slightly lower AUM. Fundraising activity was up 50% compared with Q1 2023. Investors are showing strong appetite for enhanced return and infrastructure strategies, although they expect fundraising to slow from the first quarter's robust levels. Recent fundraising is not yet reflected in AUM, which fell modestly in the quarter to $144 billion, driven by negative market and FX movements.
Before turning to our outlook, I want to briefly touch on free cash flow. Cash flow conversion has improved for the second consecutive quarter, and we are beginning to see the reversal of incentive compensation headwinds that we experienced last year, driven by record earnings in 2022. We expect to generate approximately $1 billion of free cash flow this year and end the year with around 1 turn of net leverage.
Now, please turn to our updated outlook on Slide 9. Although interest rate expectations have changed significantly and the economic outlook is more uncertain, as Bob noted, we remain confident that we'll earn core EPS in the range of $4.25 to $4.65 this year. Within Advisory, we continue to expect mid-teens SOP growth unless economic conditions take a sharp turn for the worse. Our base case scenario envisions that the economy remains resilient and interest rate cuts are delayed. Under these conditions, faster leasing growth compensates for subdued sales activity.
As Bob mentioned, we also still anticipate mid-teens SOP growth for the GWS segment. SOP growth will be very heavily weighted to the second-half, as recent wins are onboarded and we see the impact of our cost cutting efforts. In REI, we now expect a more pronounced SOP decline, given continued higher interest rates. However, the range of outcomes is wider than normal, with the key variable being whether the market for development project sales improved late in the year. While REI SOP is unusually depressed right now, we expect these businesses to lead our growth once market conditions inevitably improve.
Additionally, as part of our broad-based efficiency efforts, our COO, Vikram Kohli, and I are taking a hard look at corporate costs and expect them to be lower for the year than initially anticipated. Assuming the midpoint of our outlook range, we expect to generate nearly 70% of full-year core EPS in the second-half of the year. This heavier than normal weighting reflects the expected cadence of GWS revenue and cost reductions and a slight recovery of our property sales and development businesses later in the year.
Our expectations for profit growth in 2024 are now driven to a greater degree by the cost components of our business, which are within our control. As such, we remain confident in our ability to achieve our earnings outlook under a range of reasonable economic assumptions.
With that, operator, we'll open the line for questions.
