Five Million Dollars, Five Years, One Word: Succession

On February 25, 2026, the compensation committee of CBRE Group's board gave one executive a $5.0 million award that pays only if he stays five years and the company clears performance hurdles set against the S&P 500. The executive was Vikram Kohli, CBRE's chief operating officer and chief executive of Advisory Services. The filing that disclosed it gave the reason in plain language: to "support Mr. Kohli’s retention in light of his significance to the Company’s long-term succession strategy".

Succession of what, the filing did not say. The company's proxy statement, filed six weeks later, listed the man at the top: Robert Sulentic, chair, president and chief executive since December 2012, age 69. Kohli was 46.

The award is 100 percent performance-based. Half depends on total shareholder return and half on core earnings per share, both measured against the companies in the S&P 500. Units vest only if the specified performance criteria are met.

The India Leasing Desk

Kohli has spent 25 years at one company. He joined CBRE in June 2001 in India, on the Transactions team, working on occupier advisory and office leasing, according to the proxy. He holds a B.B.A. from Delhi University's College of Business Studies and an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

The climb ran through Asia. He became senior director of global transactions and executive director of sales management for Asia Pacific. In April 2018 he was named regional managing director for Southeast Asia, responsible for the non-Singapore markets of Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Cambodia.

That year he set out his view of one of those markets in a signed article for BRINK. "When debating the most dynamic emerging markets globally, it’s hard to lose sight of Vietnam." He read the investor flows as a long commitment: "This tells us that foreign investors are not merely entering Vietnam to set up operations; they are committed to keeping their money here." And he was unbothered by volatility: "Further, as the 2015 real estate market recovery shows, the occasional market correction is good news in the long run."

From there the moves came quickly, and they moved him away from deals and toward the machinery of the company: chief operating officer for Southeast Asia in April 2019; vice president of corporate finance in July 2020; global group president of business intelligence in July 2021; chief executive of the CBRE Platform in January 2023; chief operating officer of the whole company in April 2023.

The Largest Segment

In April 2024 CBRE gave its chief operating officer direct oversight of both of its real estate services segments, Advisory Services and Global Workplace Solutions. The chief executive of Global Workplace Solutions left the company that September.

Nine months later the structure changed again. On January 14, 2025, alongside its agreement to acquire the flexible-workplace provider Industrious, CBRE announced that Kohli had been promoted and given an added title: chief executive of Advisory Services, the company's largest segment, spanning leasing, capital markets and valuation.

The first full year under that title produced the numbers. Advisory revenue for 2025 rose 14.4 percent to $8,840 million. Segment operating profit rose 22.1 percent to $1,834 million. In the fourth quarter, global leasing revenue reached a new high for any quarter.

The same quarter carried a cost. CBRE's fourth-quarter GAAP net income was reduced by $279 million, which the company attributed to the non-cash impact of buying out the Advisory pension plan in the United Kingdom and an increased reserve for fire-safety remediation in its U.K. development business.

For 2025, Kohli's total compensation was $9,719,011.

The Office Problem

The growth has not been even. In the third quarter of 2026, Advisory revenue rose 11.0 percent to $2,441 million and segment operating profit rose 15.9 percent to $467 million. Global property sales revenue climbed 28 percent. But inside U.S. leasing, which rose 4 percent overall, office was down 2 percent; industrial carried the gain, up 16 percent.

The traditional core of the business he runs, office leasing in the United States, was shrinking even as the segment grew.

The Infrastructure Bet

Two days before those results, Kohli was the executive CBRE put in front of its next acquisition. On October 20, 2026, the company announced a definitive agreement to buy Onnec Group, a London-based provider of data center infrastructure services with about 800 employees serving hyperscalers in the United Kingdom, Continental Europe and Asia Pacific.

The initial price is £460 million, about $610 million, in cash. On top of that sits an earnout of up to £300 million, about $400 million, tied to growth thresholds. CBRE expects Onnec to produce about £370 million in revenue and more than £50 million of core EBITDA in 2027.

Kohli framed the deal as strategy rather than opportunism. "CBRE is pursuing an explicit strategy to build a global infrastructure services business to complement our real estate services business. We’ve long believed Onnec is an excellent fit in this strategy", he said. "The acquisition is also consistent with our ongoing effort to build resilient businesses that benefit from secular tailwinds."

The scale of that strategy is now in CBRE's own reporting. Its third-quarter release said infrastructure services revenue rose 50 percent to $4.5 billion on a trailing twelve-month basis. The company expects its Critical Infrastructure Services business line, including Onnec, to generate nearly $4.5 billion of revenue in 2027, and total infrastructure services revenue across the company of nearly $7.0 billion.

The Onnec transaction still needs regulatory approvals and is expected to close around the end of the year.

That leaves the February filing where it started. A $5 million award that pays only if CBRE outperforms, a chief executive of 69, and a chief operating officer who has spent 25 years inside the company and now fronts both its largest segment and its newest bet. The award's five-year clock runs to 2031. The filing named the strategy it serves. It did not name the date.