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Here's Why You Should Retain Jones Lang Stock in Your Portfolio Now

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Key Takeaways

  • JLL benefits from a resilient lines of business, tech investments and strong outsourcing demand.
  • Solid balance sheet strength and favorable investment grade ratings to sail through challenging times.
  • JLL's growth hurt by macroeconomic uncertainty, occupiers cautious approach and competition.

Jones Lang LaSalle Incorporated (JLL - Free Report) , popularly known as JLL, is expected to gain from the continued strength of its resilient lines of business and favorable outsourcing trends. However, macroeconomic uncertainty, occupiers cautious approach and competition remain a concern.

What’s Aiding JLL?

JLL has a broad range of real estate products and services as well as extensive knowledge of domestic and international real estate markets, thus enabling it to operate as a single-source provider of real estate solutions. Its superior client services and strategic investment in technology and innovation are expected to help grow market share and win relationships. Strategic technology investments enable the company to navigate challenging times.

Moreover, JLL's diversified and resilient platform and cost-optimization efforts are expected to support its adjusted EBITDA. Given its strong performance in 2024, management projects 2024 adjusted EBITDA to be within the range of $1.25 - $1.45 billion. We expect fee revenues to increase 7.9% and 7.3% year over year in 2025 and 2026, respectively. Adjusted EBITDA is projected to rise 13.5% in 2025, 15.9% in 2026 and 15.9% in 2027.

JLL’s Real Estate Management Services segment is well-positioned to benefit from favorable trends in the outsourcing business. Corporations are looking for the company’s wide-ranging knowledge and the breadth of its services, including sustainability. In the post-pandemic period, the trend for organizations to outsource real estate services and seek strategic advice on reimagining their workspaces and workstyles to boost culture, attract talent and drive performance has gathered more strength.

Amid the rising trend of outsourcing real estate needs by companies, new contract wins and the expansion of services with existing clients are likely to aid JLL’s performance in the upcoming period. The company remains confident in the long-term trajectory of the Workplace Management business as its sales pipeline is strong and focused on capturing mandate expansion opportunities. We expect a year-over-year increase of 9.6% in JLL’s Real Estate Management Services segment’s total revenues in 2025.

JLL is focused on maintaining balance sheet strength and adequate liquidity to enjoy operational flexibility. The company exited the first quarter of 2025 with $3.31 billion of corporate liquidity and a net leverage of 1.4X. As of March 31, 2025, it had investment-grade ratings of Baa1 from Moody’s and BBB+ from S&P Global, which highlight financial and balance-sheet strength, enabling it to borrow at a favorable rate. Hence, with a solid balance sheet, the company is well-poised to sail through challenging times and capitalize on solid opportunities.

What’s Hurting JLL?

Macroeconomic uncertainty and geopolitical unrest have resulted in an uneven recovery in the global economy. Also, capital markets have slowed down due to restrictive underwriting assumptions and rising debt costs amid an elevated interest rate environment.

Occupiers continue to adopt a cautious approach under present market circumstances, awaiting greater price discovery, which is causing a delay in the closing timeline for transactions, particularly for large-scale transactions. As a result, an industry-wide slowdown in investment sales and leasing activity across certain asset types has led to an underperformance in the company’s transaction-based businesses in recent years, specifically Capital Markets and Leasing Advisory.

Competition from other real estate service providers and institutional players on the international, regional and local markets is a concern for JLL. Also, some of them are larger on a regional or local basis or have a stronger position in a specific market segment or service offering. This could curb JLL’s ability to raise fees, affecting profitability.

Shares of this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company have declined 6.1% over the past three months, against the industry’s 9.9% growth.

 

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Stock to Consider

A better-ranked stock from the operations real estate sector is Ferrovial SE (FER - Free Report) . FER currently sports a Zacks Rank of #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Ferrovial’s 2025 earnings per share is pegged at 99 cents, which indicates a year-over-year decrease of 35.7%.


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