JLL has created a Country CEO position for the United States and given it to Mark Gibson, the capital markets executive who ran HFF before the brokerage bought it in 2019. The appointment is effective immediately.
The move, announced in a release dated Oct. 14, 2026 from the firm’s Chicago headquarters, is organizational rather than financial: JLL’s business lines keep their existing global reporting structures and their existing leaders. What changes is that a single executive is now accountable for how the firm shows up in its largest market, through a newly formed U.S. Executive Committee that brings those business-line leaders together around shared clients.
JLL framed the structure as an export of a model it already runs elsewhere. The company said the role follows the country CEO approach it uses in its other major geographies.
The problem the role is meant to solve
Chief executive Christian Ulbrich tied the appointment to a change in how large corporate occupiers and investors buy real estate services.
“In today’s complex operating environment, companies are looking to fewer, more strategic partners to advise them across their entire real estate portfolio,” Ulbrich said in the release. “The Country CEO, U.S. will be central to delivering the expertise and scale our clients require.”
That is a familiar argument in commercial real estate services, where the large global firms have spent a decade assembling leasing, capital markets, valuation, property management and advisory businesses under one roof, then discovering that clients still deal with them one silo at a time. The country CEO is the standard answer: someone whose job is the relationship rather than the product line.
JLL placed the appointment under the “Deepen Client Relationships” element of Accelerate 2030, the multi-year strategy it describes as having six imperatives.
Gibson, for his part, leaned on the same theme. “I’m honored to take on this new role and look forward to partnering with colleagues across JLL to continue delivering exceptional value for our clients at a global, national and local level,” he said. “I’ve always said that this is a team sport. The real estate landscape today is too complex and nuanced for any one person to offer what our clients need at scale; fortunately, at JLL, we have the brightest experts across every real estate discipline.”
A capital markets succession, too
The announcement carries a second piece of news. Gibson has led JLL’s Capital Markets business in the Americas for seven years and will stay in that job through the end of 2026 to hand it off. On Jan. 1, 2027, Kevin MacKenzie becomes CEO of Capital Markets, Americas.
MacKenzie is currently president of that business. He joined HFF in 2004, moved across several parts of the capital markets platform, and stepped into the president’s role and a seat on JLL’s Global Capital Markets Board on Jan. 1, 2025 β a sequence that reads as a two-year planned handover now reaching its conclusion.
“We have a deep bench of experts and strong continuity of leadership in our Capital Markets team β as evidenced by Kevin’s appointment,” said Richard Bloxam, CEO of Capital Markets Services at JLL. “Kevin has built strong teams across multiple markets and business lines, bringing the best of JLL to our clients. His experience and track record make him the natural choice to lead Americas Capital Markets.”
The HFF thread
Gibson’s rΓ©sumΓ© is a reminder of how JLL assembled the business he will now oversee. HFF was an independent capital markets advisory firm, and Gibson was its chief executive until JLL acquired it in 2019; he has run the combined Americas capital markets operation since. MacKenzie’s tenure also begins at HFF, in 2004.
That matters practically. Capital markets β the business of arranging sales and debt for commercial property β rises and falls with transaction volume, which leasing and property management revenue does not do to the same degree; through the interest-rate run-up of the past several years it was the part of the business most exposed to a frozen market. On our reading, elevating the executive who ran it through that stretch to the top U.S. seat says something about where JLL expects the next phase of client demand to sit.
Whether a coordinating committee changes what clients experience is a harder question, and one the firm’s own results will answer over several quarters rather than at announcement. JLL reported annual revenue of $26.1 billion and more than 112,000 employees worldwide as of June 30, 2026. Recent JLL work in the market has included arranging the $147 million sale of an Atlanta-area senior housing portfolio. More brokerage and people news is collected on RealtyWire’s agents and brokerages page, including the recent appointment of Paul Vanderslice as president and chief executive of the CRE Finance Council.
