You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: During the call, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe provide useful information for investors.
A transcript of this conference call will also be posted on our website.
In what continues to be a challenging and volatile year, I remain impressed by the resilience of our employees across the world.
Their dedication and success in providing unparalleled service to our clients has been nothing short of remarkable and I'm extremely proud and grateful for all that they have done.
As cases begin to rise and impact the reentry process to various degrees across the world, we continued to monitor the situation carefully and strictly adhere to the guidance of local and global health authorities to help manage the spread of the virus.
The health and well-being of our people, clients and communities remain our first priority.
Turning to the market environment, global economic activity recovered some ground in the third quarter, despite the pandemic's continuing impact on both global and regional real estate fundamentals.
Improving economic indicators remain vulnerable to a potential resurgence of the virus as cases and hospitalizations rising in many countries around the world.
Near-term uncertainty continues to dampen forecast into the severity and longevity of the effects of the pandemic, as the world awaits the broad-based distribution of an effective vaccine before we can begin to regain some semblance of normality.
COVID-19 has accelerated many workplace trends that were prevalent in the commercial real estate industry prior to the Pandemic.
These include experiential workspaces, outsource real estate functions, and increased focus on employee wellbeing.
As a result of the changes the pandemic has had on how people work in suits and boards have increased their focus on real estate decisions to ensure their office spaces will suit their future needs.
Turning specifically to the global office leasing market, JLL Research reported that activity in the third quarter was down 46% from a year earlier, reflecting an improvement from Q2, but a continuation of subdued demand.
Asia-Pacific recorded a decrease in activity of only 5% relative to last year while EMEA and the United States were down 52% and 55% respectively.
Vacancy rates moved up across all regions in Q3, so the global vacancy right now recorded at 12.1%, reflecting a 90 basis point increase.
Declines in investment sales decelerated in the third quarter as global volumes down 44% compared to the same period last year.
Despite the headwinds associated with the pandemic, I'm pleased that our diversified and scaled platform generated solid results for the third quarter.
Overall third quarter results were at the upper end of our expectations due to -- in part to stable one-time items that are not expected to benefit future quarters to the same extent.
Consolidated revenue fell 12% to $4 billion and fee revenue declined 23% to $1.4 billion, in local currency.
Adjusted EBITDA of $244 million represented a decline of 19% from the prior year although adjusted EBITDA margin increased 90 basis points to 17.4% in local currency, driven by cost mitigation initiatives as well as government relief program.
Adjusted net income totaled $156 million for the quarter and adjusted diluted earnings per share totaled $2.99.
Corporate Solutions, again, demonstrated its ability to withstand challenging market conditions, posting a modest fee revenue decline of 2% for the quarter.
Strengths in Facility Management was slightly offset by declines in EMEA Mobile Engineering, which continues to face pandemic related headwinds.
Current pipelines for Corporate Solutions are stronger than last year, though the pandemic continues to create delays on real estate decisions affecting the closure rate.
As expected, our transaction-based service lines, capital markets and leasing recorded notable declines for the quarter as activity remains depressed due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic.
Despite the overall declines, we're encouraged by our performance in some of the less impacted sub sectors such as industrial and logistics, which have shown significant resiliency throughout this year.
Furthermore, we have seen a strong rebuilding of our transactions pipeline since Q2.
These improving pipeline figures offer encouraging indicators for future performance though near-term uncertainty continues to linger.
Clients increasingly turn to JLL for our insights on operating the real estate and preparing for post-pandemic world.
Our conversations focus, first, on helping them evaluate their workplace challenge and objectives.
Then we develop long-term solutions that will enable successful transitions while preserving their ability to be agile, adaptable and resilient, as well as productive and profitable.
We've crafted the framework for reimagining the workplace to assist in this transition, which is focused on four strategic pillars; business, people, workplace, and commercial real estate.
Our consultancy expertise is in significant demand because JLL is uniquely capable of providing our clients advisory and execution services as a result of our global reach and full service platform.
Further investments in our technology platform have proven to be a strong differentiator when conveying our capabilities and dialog with our clients as the pandemic has accelerated technological disruption in the commercial real estate industry.
We continue to expand our collaborations across business lines to respond to clients' evolving needs.
For instance, we were able to expand an existing engagement with a major regional American bank to a five year mandate.
Multiple services in this assignment are facility management, transaction management and brokerage, project and development services, occupancy planning and the management and administration of all leases.
The bank identified several benefits of consolidating these services into JLL including our single provider technology platform, our shared services centers, the ability to consolidate services and the opportunity to provide a sustainable carrier roadmap for the internal staff transferring to JLL.
This is just one successful outcome of acting as one JLL.
It reflects our ability to deliver the full value of JLL across business lines in every client engagement.
In this quarter, we took further action as part of our disciplined cost mitigation program while simultaneously preserving our ability to maintain prudent investments across our business.
The actions taken better align our cost structure with current demand.
Karen will discuss this in more detail, but let me assure you that we are positioning the Company to drive strong growth and play a leading role in the recovery.
I'm confident that JLL will gain market share over the medium and longer term, as clients increasingly seek an advisor with global full-service capabilities but has the expertise and resources to help them reimagine their workplaces.
Strong earnings and cash flow management led to another standout quarter for cash generation, as evidenced by $320 million of net debt reduction, resulting in our leverage now below pre-HFF transaction level.
Our capital allocation policy is anchored in maintaining a strong investment grade balance sheet and ample liquidity to support seasonality in economic cycles, organic and inorganic investments to drive growth and long-term value.
In addition, we remain committed to returning cash to our shareholders.
In the third quarter, we repurchased $25 million worth of shares, bringing our year-to-date cash return to shareholders to $50 million.
This is slightly ahead of the amount returned in previous years via dividend.
For at least the foreseeable future, we do not expect to resume paying a dividend and instead will return cash to shareholders via share repurchases.
As we move through the fourth quarter and 2021, we will continue to evaluate business and market conditions to determine the appropriate mechanism to return value to shareholders in alignment with our long-term strategy.
Overall, I'm pleased with our third quarter performance, given the current environment.
There are three points I'll highlight to summarize the quarter.
First, while our consolidated year-over-year fee revenue percentage decline improved slightly from the second quarter on an organic basis, our top and bottom lines reflected meaningful growth in dollar terms over the second quarter.
This is an important trend in an unusual year when seasonal revenue growth is at risk of being disrupted.
Second we, again, generated strong cash flow which were used to repay debt to below pre-HFF acquisition levels.
Finally, we are taking actions to align our cost structure to the current environment, while continuing to invest in strategic priorities that we believe will drive long-term value.
Our diversified business continues to be impacted in different ways by the pandemic's economic shock.
The most significant impact continues to be on our transactional businesses.
While our pipelines in both leasing and capital markets has increased since the end of June, uncertainty remains regarding the evolution of the pandemic and its impact to decision making by corporate occupiers and investors.
Conversely, Property & Facility Management remains a growth area, driven largely by new business wins as corporate occupiers and investors seek our services due to increased building management standards.
Partially offsetting this top line growth were continued headwinds from our U.K. Mobile Engineering business and the late 2019 divestiture of our Continental Europe Property Management Business.
Moving now to a detailed review of operating performance.
Our consolidated adjusted EBITDA margin expanded 90 basis points to 17.4%, driven by our ongoing cost management actions and a 240 basis point impact from various government relief programs globally, partially offset by lower transactional revenue.
Consolidated leasing fee revenue declined 30%.
Our investment in the higher growth asset classes of industrial, supply chain and logistics continue to provide partial offsets to the current softness in the office sector.
We compared favorably with the 46% decline in global office leasing activity, reflecting the strength of our platform.
Broadly, clients remain cost conscious and seek to delay significant decisions regarding future real estate strategies.
According to JLL Research, the U.S. office market has seen an increase in the share of lease activity from renewals to 55% in the third quarter from 29% in 2019, as well as a reduction in aggregate effective rents of roughly 7% in mid-March, through both an increase in free rent concessions and a decline in starting rents relative to pre-COVID.
Looking ahead, our fourth quarter U.S. gross leasing pipeline increased 16% from three months prior.
We are encouraged by these trends but emphasize closing rates and timing could be delayed in this environment.
Capital Markets' fee revenue declined 43%, driven by an over 50% decline in investment advisory and debt placement.
However, we did see stability in our multifamily business, again, reflecting the resiliency of our diversified platform.
Looking at the global capital market environment, markets of scale with access to domestic capital in Asia Pacific and Western Europe outperformed while the Americas continued to experience the most significant declines.
Global investment volume dropped 44%.
Activity has been curtailed as investors adjust valuations and pricing to reflect the current environment.
So we are seeing a tightening of the bid-ask spread in some markets.
The Industrial and U.S. multifamily sectors have been the most resilient to-date.
Our Capital Markets 2020 pipeline improved modestly across geographies as the quarter progressed, with pipeline at the end of the September up high single-digits, in percentage terms, from the end of June.
We are also encouraged by the recent reemergence of cross-border activities.
The longer-term trend of increased allocations to real estate is very much intact with significant capital on the side-lines ready to be deployed with highly liquid debt markets.
There was no change to our multifamily portfolio loan loss reserve and forbearance activity has been minimal to-date.
As Christian mentioned, our Corporate Solutions business was down 2% in the quarter and flat year-to-date.
We continue to be encouraged about the secular outsourcing trends.
Turning to our Real Estate Services segment, we experienced relatively consistent percentage declines in fee revenue across geographies, but meaningful differences in profitability.
In the Americas, strong fee revenue growth in Property & Facility Management was more than offset by material declines in other service lines.
We are encouraged by the moderation and the pace of decline in Americas Leasing and the reasonably stable rate of organic decline in Americas Capital Markets compared with the prior quarter.
Our ongoing cost mitigation actions and a 180 basis point benefit from government relief programs drove an adjusted EBITDA margin of 20.9% compared with 19.3% a year earlier.
In EMEA, all service lines reported fee revenue declines, with the most significant decline in Capital Markets due to softness in the office sector.
EMEA leasing, while down 24% materially outperformed the approximate 50% decline in market volumes.
Including a 120 basis point benefit from government relief program, the adjusted EBITDA margin was 2.7% compared with 6.1% a year earlier.
The decline in profitability was driven primarily by lower transactional revenue, partially offset by ongoing cost saving actions.
Within our Asia-Pacific business, Property & Facility Management and Advisory & Consulting fee revenue were reasonably stable, but the transactional businesses were down meaningfully, particularly Capital Markets.
Our underperformance in Asia Pacific Capital Markets was largely concentrated in Japan and Greater China.
Including a 710 basis point net benefit from government relief programs, the adjusted EBITDA margin was 20.2% compared with 14.2% a year earlier.
The relative stability and profitability excluding the government relief was primarily due to ongoing cost mitigation action.
Turning to LaSalle; fee revenue was down 2%.
Advisory fees, which are annuity like and comprised approximately 80% of LaSalle's fee revenue this quarter grew 4%.
Higher transaction fees tied to a Japanese REIT secondary offering mostly offset lower incentive fees.
We expect a similar level of incentive fees in the fourth quarter as the third quarter which would be considerably lower than the level earned in fourth quarter 2019.
Equity earnings were $8 million, driven mostly by our co-investment in a publicly traded REIT in Japan.
LaSalle's AUM totaled $66 billion at quarter end, sequentially up about $1 billion.
Now, I'll comment on how we are thinking about our cost structure.
Changes in client needs, particularly in our transactional businesses and continued uncertainty about the pace of recovery made it clear that we needed to accelerate certain cost management action.
Year-to-date through October, we have taken actions that will result in over $135 million of annualized fixed cost savings.
Separately, our expense management focus delivered over $240 million of non-permanent savings over the first nine months of 2020, including about $180 million from cost mitigation actions and $67 million from government relief.
Roughly half of these non-permanent savings were realized in the third quarter.
These non-permanent savings represent cost likely to return in future periods as business volumes recover.
Our cost actions are part of an ongoing process to improve our operating efficiency.
We are confident these actions combined with process improvements and leveraging our technology platform will allow us to continue to deliver exceptional value to our clients and not impede our long-term growth potential.
Pivoting to our balance sheet; the sequential improvement in earnings and modest capex and investment spending drove a $320 million reduction to net debt, which ended the quarter at $752 million.
At the end of September, leverage was 0.8 times, down from 1.1 times at the end of June, and just below levels prior to the HFF acquisition, one quarter ahead of our initial expectation.
We have nearly $2.8 billion of liquidity, including approximately $440 million of cash and 85% of capacity available on our $2.75 billion revolver.
We are well positioned to invest in strategies which generate long-term profitable growth, while also returning cash to shareholders.
Looking ahead, much will depend on the evolution of the pandemic and client's decisions on their go forward real estate strategy and investment.
Long term, we are confident that our continuous efforts to refine and enhance our differentiated global platform position JLL to fulfill the evolving needs of our clients, capture market share and benefit from the long-term secular growth tailwinds of our industry.
As such, we remain focused on achieving our 2025 Beyond target and believe we are well positioned to continue to generate significant free cash flow and stakeholder value in the years ahead.
Back to Christian for further remarks.
As we look to the rest of the year, a sharp rebound in global GDP growth experienced in the third quarter compared to the second quarter is expect to slow due to a combination of unwinding fiscal stimulus and ongoing caution leading to a more prolonged recovery period.
With that backdrop and realizing the difficulty in forecasting the recovery from the pandemic, we expect the fourth quarter operating environment to be relatively consistent with previous quarters on a year-over-year comparison.
We expect that our higher margin transaction-based service lines will continue to face significant headwinds which has a disproportionate impact on profitability.
I'd like to take a minute to provide our latest thoughts regarding the future of commercial real estate and specifically the office.
Commercial real estate remains a very valuable asset class for investors and a beneficiary of continued rising allocations of that capital, as they are keenly aware of the long-term fundamentals that position the industry for growth.
With regard to the future of office, we view the transition to a hybrid work environment as the new normal, one in which employees have a greater sense of empowerment in determining where and how they want to work.
This sustained increase in remote work opportunities will largely be offset by a combination of job creation and the de-densification of the office space.
Depending upon this, we believe that the transformation to a hybrid workplace will see a reallocation of office space to enable creation, collaboration, communication and culture.
As I stated in the second quarter call, while it may look different and be utilized in new ways, the office will continue to have a vital future, specifically as a key driver of corporate culture.
These changes strengthen the value proposition of JLL as there are a few corporations that can guide our clients through this evolution of the workspace on a global scale.
As I mentioned, JLL's solid third quarter performance is a testament to our dedicated employees and our collective commitment to providing world-class advice and solutions to our clients, regardless of market conditions.
Our results demonstrate the strength of our business model, diversified exposure to both business lines and geographies, and our ability to transact across asset classes.
We remain very well positioned to capitalize on not only the anticipated recovery from the pandemic, but the long-term macro trends that support robust commercial real estate growth.
I'm confident in JLL's ability to succeed regardless of the circumstances in delivering sustainable long-term growth and achieving our goal of shaping the future of real estate for a better world.
Operator, please explain the Q&A process.

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q3 adjusted earnings per share $2.99.
jones lang lasalle - pandemic continued to disrupt jll's operations, most significantly in transaction-based service lines.

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