World class real estate company with floundering technology organisation - Senior Software Engineer CBRE Employee Review

2.0
Oct 16, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1. CBRE is the best commercial real estate company in the world. If you are interested in commercial real estate this is the place you want to be. 2. Company has been around for over 100 years, so its easily the most stable big real estate company. Paychecks are reliable. 3. The companies revenue growth since the Trammell Crow acquisition has been huge. The current CEO Bob and his leadership team have been instrumental in moving the company within striking distance of the Fortune 100. Can't argue with results like that. 4. The Seattle and NYC technology product development teams are easily some of the most capable and talented people I have ever worked with.

Cons

For context I worked in the Digital and Technology / IT division; CBRE is huge so experiences will vary a lot by job role and location. 1. Over the last five years or so the D&T division was globally built up rapidly with limited planning or coordination with the wider company. Many but not all projects started with good intentions but lost focus on our users needs and have extremely low adoption as a result. Because of the high cost of investment the rest of the company is not happy with the results and everyone knows it. This has created a culture in D&T of extreme top down micromanagement that make it nearly impossible to make progress on customer outcomes due to constantly shifting priorities. The leadership is now scrambling to adapt and is not willing to take feedback from teams on the ground. 2. My former department was split between New York City and Seattle and collectively built some of the most highly adopted and well liked user centered technology products in the CBRE. In the last year a new set of D&T middle management came in and laid off half the department and outsourced work to a team of contractors in India. This was all before Covid19. Over the next nine months another 25% of the team left voluntarily (including me), because the new middle management team has been making decisions about product direction and team staffing that are so far in the wrong direction that our best option was to find new jobs during a pandemic induced recession. Now the team is wildly understaffed and the same middle management team that made all these decisions are shocked the team is struggling to produce and has low moral. And I felt like they were blaming our department for that outcome.

Explore other reviews about CBRE

5.0
Jun 29, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

A great organization to work for with friendly staff.

Cons

insurance is not as good as I would have hoped.

1.0
Jun 26, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Honestly? Not much. The vision insurance was decent, I guess. Truthfully though, there wasn't much.

Cons

Management's refusal to allow employees freedom. I routinely got praise from the client and hit the maximum score on my goals. If things weren't done "by the book", they were wrong. The health insurance was awful. Going to self-employment, one of the things that you hear is that you're going to pay a lot for health insurance. However, I'm actually paying LESS than when I worked for CBRE. When you work for CBRE, don't consider job security something that you're going to have. I saw two employees with 15+ years for the company get laid off, with zero severance and no option to transfer elsewhere, unless they wanted to uproot their families and move states for more work and a pay cut. This is the worst company that I've ever had the displeasure to work for. If you have literally any other option of employment, please consider doing that.

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