Since stepping into the role of president and CEO of Coldwell Banker Realty two years ago, Kamini Lane has been laser-focused on transforming the brokerage into an industry leader, prioritizing service and technology through a people-first approach, she says.
Though she’s now leading one of the largest brokerages in the country, Lane’s career has not always been in the real estate realm. After graduating from UC Berkeley, Lane worked at one of the hottest tech companies from the early 2000s—eBay. As a category manager in the fashion category, she was behind the scenes in helping entrepreneurs build and successfully run their businesses.
After getting her MBA at Harvard Business School and spending the next decade working in marketing and branding, Lane’s experience at eBay came full circle at Tradesy, where she led marketing and oversaw the small business division. Directly helping entrepreneurs at both eBay and Tradesy was essentially Lane’s direct thread into empowering agents in the real estate industry.
“Real estate agents are the largest class of entrepreneurs in the U.S. economy,” says Lane. “And so, in this role at Coldwell Banker Realty, it is sort of like the ultimate realization of that passion and purpose—that I’m not just behind the scenes, but really at the helm of a company that powers tens of thousands of entrepreneurs every single day. And that is truly my ‘why.’”
Hands-on leadership and people-centric technology
Upon joining Coldwell Banker, Lane made it a priority to engage directly with agents and field leaders. From those face-to-face conversations, it became clear to Lane that agents at Coldwell value service and take pride in providing exceptional service to their clients.
Above all, Coldwell Banker is a service company, says Lane.
“We are dedicated to providing hands-on, human-led service, and our technology is people-centric. So we have a great tech stack, and we’re improving that tech stack literally every day to help make our agents more productive and efficient—and we have people at the center of that technology,” she explains. “We have no notion that technology, in and of itself, is going to be the end-all-be-all.”
Coldwell’s “Listing Concierge,” for example—a program to help agents market their listings—has an 80%-plus adoption rate in certain regions, and there’s an entire team at the center of it, shares Lane.
“We’re not telling agents, ‘Here’s a platform; good luck.’ We’re saying, ‘Here’s an amazing piece of technology, and here’s your Listing Concierge coordinator who’s going to hold your hand in as much as you need your hand held throughout this process,’” she explains. “It’s an example of how technology accelerates the potential and productivity of an agent; it’s not replacing the agent.”
By using this AI-powered tool to draft listing descriptions—which uses machine learning to understand what phrases and words make a property most likely to sell—agents can spend more time tailoring it for their audience, says Lane.
When she asks agents what they love most about their brokerage, she always hears the same response—the people.
From the outset, Lane has visited about two markets each month to spend time with her agents and leaders on the ground. To further that initiative, one of the first things she did after joining the company was to reorganize the leadership team by removing a layer of leadership between the C-suite and the field to elevate field leaders.
“So it’s people who really have the connectivity to enterprise-wide strategy at the executive level—the Coldwell Banker Realty executive committee—but they are also really, really plugged into the field and to what agents are experiencing, and talking about and facing every single day,” she says. “I really try to prioritize hearing directly from agents so that agent feedback is crafting our strategy.”
Navigating industry shifts
The Clear Cooperation Policy (CCP) has been a hot topic across the industry. In a recent op-ed, published weeks ahead of the National Association of REALTORS®’ CCP announcement, Lane advocated for the repeal, rather than the removal, of CCP. Noting that while there are instances where marketing to a limited group of people is appropriate, restricting access to homes harms buyers, given the low supply of homes for sale and the increase in prices and rates.
After NAR announced last week that it was preserving its Clear Cooperation Policy and introducing a new listing category that allows “delayed marketing-exempt listings” not circulated through IDX for a period determined by the MLS, Lane offered her thoughts on the change.
“It’s not a surprise, and it’s not really a meaningful shift from the current policy,” she shares. “I don’t see this as a big change. First of all, I think it is purposefully not a big change. I think that NAR, in choosing this direction, has specifically chosen to not make a big change, so I’ll say that.”
Emphasizing that transparency needs to be at the center of the conversation, Lane said that whether all listings are put into the MLS or a private listing network, neither is in the best interest of the consumer.
“What is always in the best interest of the consumer is to have a trusted real estate professional that is going to be honest and have an intelligent, informed expert-conversation about a listing strategy,” she adds. “And nobody’s talking about that right now; nobody’s talking about having an intelligent conversation with your real estate professional about the best strategy for your listing that might be listing off-MLS for a certain period of time.”
When dealing with changes—however small—in the industry, Lane, again, focuses on how to best serve her agents. For a change like this, the goal is to ensure all leaders are “absolutely fluent in the industry changes and in the settlement implementation.” Regarding rules and regulations, Coldwell’s leaders needed to be able to answer what an agent had to do, what they could do, and what they absolutely shouldn’t do.
In anticipation of the NAR settlement and the industry practice changes that came along with it, Lane introduced monthly educational town hall meetings in January 2024 to prepare agents and leaders for the settlement implementation and establish a regular cadence of learning.
After those eight months of preparation, when those new changes were implemented, there were no hiccups.
“It was the quietest day,” Lane recalled. “That whole week, the week after—it was so quiet because everyone was like, ‘Okay, the day is here, but we’ve literally been preparing for eight months for this.’”
Supporting women in the workplace
What Moves Her, an initiative with local community groups aimed at supporting women in real estate, was started in early 2020, before Lane’s time at Coldwell Banker, but she has complemented it in several different ways.
During her conversation with RISMedia, Lane emphasized how important these communities are, given what women in the industry face.
“It has been especially important and timely, just given what we’ve seen in the industry in terms of sexual harassment and discrimination—all the way back to early last year with the head of NAR and the allegations that came out against him, to the horrifying stuff against the Alexander brothers,” Lane says. “Everybody deserves to feel safe at work. And when you think about the fact that the majority of real estate agents are women, and they are in particularly vulnerable situations because—first of all, they’re independent contractors. They don’t have a paycheck that’s coming in. They don’t have the same sort of corporate support network at large that they do in most big companies, or even medium-sized companies, and they’re walking into homes by themselves. It’s inherently nerve-wracking in some points.”
Lane talked about her experience as a woman in the real estate industry on the What Moves Her podcast. In many ways, Lane says, this industry is so uniquely amazing for women.
“I was a single mother when I first started in the industry, and I think that the humanity of real estate really is a wonderfully unique thing, especially if you’re somebody who has more challenging circumstances.”
After joining Coldwell, Lane had an incredibly ambitious agenda for the company. She also had a baby on the way, and her leaving for maternity leave was “not even a hiccup.”
“There was not even a second of worry,” she recalls. “The funny thing is, I had a very ambitious agenda for this company when I joined, and there is no time pressure like a baby coming, and so it was almost an accelerant for our progress—not even almost; it was an accelerant for our progress.”
There were only a few months between restructuring, having a new executive team on board and welcoming the baby, so Lane had to formulate a strong strategy before taking maternity leave.
“I am a very strong believer in taking time off—new parents, moms, dads, however you have a baby—whether you birth a baby, adopt a baby, whatever your parent journey is. I think it’s critically important to take time to bond with your child, and I wanted to demonstrate that personal value by doing it myself.”
Before leaving, Lane made sure to tell her team that she wouldn’t be taking the type of maternity leave where she would still be typing emails from the maternity ward. She wanted the team to have clarity, transparency and purpose—independent of her being there every single day. While she could provide guidance here and there, she says, she wanted to know that the team’s priority would be to keep the business going with absolute certainty and clarity about what their goals were and what her expectations were for her to give her baby absolute priority.
Diversity, equity and inclusion
While many companies are rolling back on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) given President Trump’s executive order to “terminate radical DEI,” Lane offers her commitment to DEI, emphasizing how critical it is for Coldwell Banker’s values.
Lane says diversity is crucial given how many communities Coldwell represents across the U.S. These communities are inherently diverse, says Lane, and without an appreciation and understanding of diversity, and without committing to representing the diversity that exists in those communities, Coldwell can’t actually be a trusted advisor.
“Diversity means diversity of experiences, diversity of skillsets, diversity of life. All of those things culminate into diversity of thought; when you have diversity of thought, you have diversity of strategy. And when you have diversity of strategy, that enables you to win in business, and I think that is some of the specificity that’s missing from the conversation,” she says. “At the end of the day, committing to DEI enables us to run a better business.”
Keeping up with the equity portion of DEI, Coldwell Banker was the first residential real estate company to endorse the bipartisan proposed legislation to add clear, comprehensive non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people to civil rights laws, according to the company’s website. In 2018, Coldwell began providing full transgender health benefits to employees and their partners. Lane’s earlier statement about women, and everybody, deserving to feel safe and included at work directly falls into Coldwell’s commitment to inclusion in the workplace.
More Concierge products
Adding to their sweep of people-powered Concierge products, Coldwell Banker “soft-launched” Transaction Concierge—a full-service contract close transaction coordination. It is free for every single Coldwell Banker Realty agent, adds Lane.
A client experience specialist—an actual human, not AI—does all of the paperwork and all of the transaction coordination for the agent so that they can focus on negotiating and closing the deal and building relationships with their clients. Instead of being wired into the nitty-gritty of the transaction details, they can work on getting repeat clients and referrals, says Lane.
This new Concierge product, with a dedicated team behind it, is available in all of Coldwell’s markets. So far, Transaction Concierge has already supported 36,000 deals.
Currently in the pilot stage, Coldwell is rolling out Social Concierge—a “do-it-for-me” social media service for all Coldwell Banker Realty agents. The fee-based service will be fully rolled out by the end of the year, adds Lane.
“Social media is so critically important to agent marketing today, but a lot of people either don’t have the desire or the skillset to really represent themselves on social media in an effective way,” says Lane, “so we’re basically saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got experts in the field, and we’ll do it for you.’”
