Emma Giamartino
Global Chief Financial Officer at CBRE Group
Thank you, Bob. We exceeded expectations with a record quarter across almost every metric, our resilient businesses, which are facilities management, property management, project management, loan servicing, valuations and recurring investment management fees grew net revenue 16% in the quarter and 14% for the year, while delivering operating leverage. Resilient businesses contributed nearly 60% of our total SOP for the year, essentially matching 2023. This relative contribution by our resilient businesses is notable in a year when our transaction revenue grew considerably, yet capital markets activity is still well below peak levels. In our Advisory segment, results were driven by record leasing revenue and a continued rebound in capital markets.
Globally, leasing revenue grew 15% with notable strength in APAC and the Americas. US office leasing delivered 28% revenue growth. Office occupiers are increasingly comfortable making long-term decisions given improved return to office momentum and a healthy economic outlook. The durability of office leasing growth was a prominent question as recently as October when we last reported earnings. While New York led most of the office leasing recovery in 2024, other markets accelerated substantially in the 4th-quarter. Gateway markets comprised of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC. And Boston grew approximately 30% in aggregate. Other large markets like Dallas, Atlanta and Seattle grew even faster and certain smaller Midwest markets, including Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Minneapolis picked-up considerably. This gives us confidence that office leasing will continue to increase as activity has spread broadly. Retail leasing also exhibited solid growth while industrial leasing was essentially flat. Turning to global property sales, revenue growth accelerated to 35%. Growth was strong across all asset classes globally with a notable increase in-office sales in the US and EMEA, albeit off a low-base of activity.
Our mortgage origination business was up 37%, led by a 76% increase in origination fees, partly offset by lower escrow income. We saw a strong pickup in loan origination volume across financing sources, most notably from the GSEs and banks. While acquisition financing is increasing, refinancings continue to lead the recovery, making up almost 60% of total volume for the quarter. Overall, advisory SOP rose 34% with improved margin on-net revenue. In the GWS segment, net revenue grew 18%. Facilities management net revenue increased 24% with broad-based strength in both the enterprise and local businesses.
We are seeing a good balance of new clients and expansions across enterprise sectors, especially technology, industrial, data centers and healthcare. Local revenue growth was led by the UK and the Americas. The Americas has emerged as the local business's second-largest region, up from the fourth largest in 2023. This is a direct result of executing our strategy to increase share in the US, a market that is still barely penetrated. Our project management business saw a solid net revenue increase with particular strength in North-America and the UK, led by real-estate and infrastructure. For the full-year 2024, Project Management net revenue grew 10% with operating leverage driving faster SOP growth. This growth was dominated by Turner and, which achieved 19% revenue growth for the year, supporting our view that the aggregate project management business will achieve accelerated growth when combined.
The GWS SOP margin improved for the full-year, reflecting our cost efforts and focus on-contract profitability. In our RII segment, SOP increased to $150 million in Q4, led by our development business. As expected, we had significant monetizations in the quarter, including several data center development sites. This was one of our development businesses' strongest quarters and reflects our distinct capabilities as a land acquir and developer as well as our proactive decision to invest in areas benefiting from secular tailwinds when others were on the sidelines. Within our Investment Management business, Q4 operating profit declined, partly driven by a ramp-up of costs in anticipation of increased capital-raising. We raised over $10 billion in 2024 with half of it coming in the 4th-quarter. AUM ended 2024 at $146 billion, essentially flat for the year. Market sentiment continues to improve with many investors positioning their portfolios to capture opportunities in the latter half of 2025.
Before turning to our outlook, I'll comment on cash-flow and capital allocation. Free-cash flow exceeded expectations, increasing to more than $1.5 billion for the year and free-cash flow conversion reached almost 100%, surpassing our 75% to 85% target range. We deployed approximately $2 billion of capital in 2024 across M&A, real-estate co-investment and share repurchases. This is in-line with our strategy to invest in resilient businesses that augment CBRE's growth profile, expand our total addressable market and generate high risk-adjusted returns. Besides several notable M&A transactions, we capitalized 29 development projects for the year, including 12 in Q4. Our significant efforts to build the pipeline over the past few years, while many investors were on the sidelines has positioned our development business to break ground on more than 50 projects in 2025, almost double the number in 2024. We estimate that we have more than $900 million of embedded net profits in our development in-process portfolio and pipeline as we capitalized a second large portfolio of development assets in the 4th-quarter, this time focused on industrial assets.
Our in-process and pipeline portfolio currently stands at more than $32 billion with outstanding balance sheet equity co-investment of approximately $800 million. And as Bob mentioned, we also continue to see significant unrecognized value in CBRE shares. This led us to repurchase more than $800 million worth of shares since the end-of-the 3rd-quarter. We have high-conviction in our growth prospects and believe our ability to consistently generate double-digit organic earnings growth justifies a premium through-cycle multiple. Looking ahead, we expect another year of strong free-cash flow generation, approximating last year's total of $1.5 billion. We anticipate free-cash flow conversion within our 75% to 85% target range this year as the benefit from bonus timing we saw in 2024 reverses. Absent material M&A, we expect to-end the year with net leverage below 1 turn, but are willing to lever up to two turns for the right M&A opportunities.
Turning to our outlook, we expect to easily set a new peak in 2025 with core EPS projected to be in the range of $5.80 to $6.10. This would represent more than 16% growth at the middle of the range, supported by mid-teens SOP growth across our resilient lines of business, momentum in leasing and a continued rebound in capital markets. It is notable that we're expecting this level of earnings when transaction activity is more muted than in other cyclical recoveries. We're again guiding to a wide range this year because of uncertainties around the level of currency headwinds and the trajectory of interest rates. We've embedded a currency translation headwind of 1% to 2% in our consolidated outlook. Absent this headwind, expected core EPS growth would be in the high-teens. Turning to our segments, we are providing guidance under our new as well as the old segment structure as shown on Slide 8, to help investors transition their coverage.
Note that all percentage growth rate estimates for the segments are in local-currency. In our Advisory segment, we expect low-to mid-teens SOP growth driven by solid leasing revenue growth and a steady capital markets recovery, both of which will underpin margin expansion. In our Building Operations and Experience segment, we expect above-trend mid-teens revenue growth, supported by locals further expansion in the US and a full-year contribution from Industrious. We anticipate continued operating leverage resulting from 2024 cost initiatives, which will drive high-teens SOP growth. In project management, we foresee significant opportunities in the US and UK across infrastructure and traditional real-estate. Combining the Turner Townsend and CBRE project management businesses requires a complex integration. As such, in the first year, we are anticipating strong but slightly below trend SOP growth in the low-to mid-teens.
Finally, in real-estate investments, we expect to improve on 2024's SOP. Investment management operating profit will likely be flat with 2024, which benefited from a large incentive fee that will not repeat. In the development business, we see continued elevated data center activity and have positioned the portfolio to benefit from this secular tailwind with data center site monetizations expected to contribute more than half of this year's development profits. As to the seasonal distribution of earnings, Q1 will once again be our smallest quarter in the year. However, the quarter should see core EBITDA increase at a high-teens rate and it should contribute a low double-digit percentage of our full-year core EPS. We also expect another strong 4th-quarter in 2025, which should account for a similar portion of our full-year core EPS as it did in 2024. In addition, we note that our restructuring efforts are largely behind us and we are seeing the benefit of margin expansion across the company.
As a reminder, we announced a major efficiency program in GWS in early 2024 to rapidly bring costs in-line with revenue. This highly successful initiative resulted in an increase in one-time cash adjustments in 2024 that will not recur in 2025. M&A-related amortization and integration costs will continue, but we are highly focused on minimizing other cash adjustments. Therefore, going into 2025, we expect to meaningfully narrow the delta between our GAAP and core earnings. With an improved market backdrop, we are poised to benefit from all the work we've done to create a resilient growth-oriented enterprise capable of sustaining double-digit growth in 2025 and beyond.
Now I'll hand it back to Bob for closing remarks. Bob?
