For three years, Kamini Lane has served as president and CEO of Coldwell Banker Realty.
When Lane — who got her feet wet in the industry as a regional manager at Compass — was appointed to the executive role, she was the first woman and first person of color to hold the position at the century-plus-old brand.
She had hopes of modernizing Coldwell Banker and bringing it into the future of real estate so that agents could flourish in their businesses.
“One of the first things that I did was really reorganize my leadership team to be more connected to the field,” Lane told Inman. “So that sort of flattened the hierarchy and created an executive team made up entirely of field leaders, people who had day-to-day expertise working with agents, who really understood and continue to understand what it means to be an agent.”
In an overarching conversation with Inman, Lane discussed Coldwell Banker’s recent evolution, including its new integration under the Compass International Holdings umbrella, and thoughts on some of the biggest topics in the news today. Here’s what she had to say.
On Coldwell Banker’s evolution
Brands that have been around for more than a century, like Coldwell Banker, are undoubtedly stable, but can use some refining every once in a while. The first step in prepping Coldwell Banker for the future under her watch, Lane said, was to upgrade the agent service experience.
“Thinking about digital transformation, thinking about AI enablement, about human-led technology and ensuring that everything that we do is geared towards providing an intuitive, modern service experience for our agents,” Lane said, ultimately trickles down to agents’ clients as well.
But as part of Lane’s effort to bring Coldwell Banker into modernity, she said the brand has also focused heavily on its agent recruitment and finding people who are committed to making a career out of real estate, despite all its challenges.
“We’re really proud that Coldwell Banker Realty invests in the development of agents,” Lane told Inman. “We know that every agent starts as a new-to-the-business agent, and we celebrate that. And also, we’re a destination for the best agents in the world, full stop. We want people who take to heart and recognize and are willing to put effort into the fact that this is an incredibly noble profession, and it’s hard.”
AI opportunities and threats
The impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on all industries are quickly becoming inescapable. But with all the exciting opportunities that AI provides, it also poses risks, both in terms of inaccuracies with the still-developing technology and the potential for eliminating traditionally human functions.
Lane said she sees AI as a tool for agent empowerment that will never fully eliminate the agent.
“[AI is] great for those low-value, high-time tasks, and it’s great to make us better at our jobs,” Lane said. “I think there’s been a lot of chatter around, ‘Is AI going to disintermediate many different roles?’ But the thing is, in real estate, what we broker is trust and relationships, and that requires a human at the center. So I think the power of AI in real estate very much is to make agents more efficient and effective, make our back-end systems more efficient and effective.”
Lane said Coldwell Banker has been using AI for splitting and submitting documents and doing compliance checks. In 2024, the firm also incorporated AI into the brand’s marketing tool, Listing Concierge, which, among other things, can write listing descriptions for agents.
But Lane also pointed out that sometimes, especially when making consequential decisions like buying a home, people just need a real human giving them some honest truths. ChatGPT, in particular, Lane said, tends to provide users with an endless loop of responses catered to what it learns that users want to hear. Although those responses might be pleasing, they can also be harmful.
“It is literally programmed to tell you what you want to hear so that you will continue to engage with it,” Lane said, citing a recently published study. “Buying or selling a home is the most important financial and emotional decision of most people’s lives, and it is incredibly dangerous to be relying on a tool that is fundamentally telling you what you want to hear so that you will continue to engage. The most valuable real estate professionals are the ones who will tell you the hard news.”
Coldwell and Compass don’t need to ‘kumbaya’
With its acquisition of Anywhere, Compass International Holdings now also owns all the Anywhere brands, including Coldwell Banker.
Lane said pre-existing Coldwell Banker agents have expressed excitement about the new development, since it means that they are able to retain their Coldwell Banker brand and identity, but will eventually receive access to Compass’s technology.
“There are not very many times in life when you can say that you had the best of everything that you had before and something wholly new and exciting,” Lane said. “This is one of those incredibly rare moments in time. All of our agents still have the phenomenal Coldwell Banker brand, they have their leadership, they have their tools and resources. They have their offices. They still ‘bleed blue,’ as we call it, because the brand affinity for Coldwell Banker is just incredible … and we get access to the Compass International Holdings platform, the technology platform that was built through over $2 billion of investment that was poured directly into creating the best-in-class technology platform specifically for real estate agents.”
The CEO further argued that being under the Compass International Holdings umbrella is actually not so different from when the Coldwell Banker brand was under the Anywhere umbrella of companies. Even though the brands obviously now work together in closer ways, Lane said it doesn’t mean agents need to have some kind of special affinity with one another.
“To be totally honest, there’s no part of me that feels like CB and Compass need to kumbaya,” Lane said.
The new Compass-Redfin agreement
Just last week, Compass unveiled the news that it entered into an agreement with Rocket Companies to post its coming-soon listings on Redfin.com, and Lane was riding high on the development.
“It is such an incredibly exciting move,” Lane said, adding that, starting in July, Coldwell Banker Realty agents will also have access to the Compass International Holdings platform and be able to put their coming-soon listings up on Redfin as well.
“So starting in July, we can put coming soons on the platform,” Lane said. “Those will get syndicated to the Redfin platform and get 60 million eyeballs — 60 million eyeballs for coming soon without the digital baggage.”
Lane said that negative insights like days on market and price cuts can have a significant impact on inventory, which isn’t always fully recognized.
“But when you have a mechanism to put your home on the market, to have 60 million people access that inventory without any risk, it’s a really powerful thing for increasing inventory in the U.S.,” Lane said. “And lack of inventory is one of the biggest problems that the U.S. housing market has right now.”
The spring market
Lane agreed with recent positive economic reports suggesting that this year’s spring market may prove more active than last year’s.
“Interest rates are coming down, so sellers are going to loosen up on that lock-in effect, and buyer demand is likely to be very healthy because people can afford more because they’re making more money. Prices are stabilizing, so there isn’t that constant fear that a home is going to be out of their reach,” Lane said. “So I’m really excited for the spring market.”
As for the weaker agents who were weeded out in the last few years as the market sputtered, Lane said it probably wasn’t a bad thing for the industry to have fewer agents overall.
“I think it’s really important that real estate is seen as an honorable profession and that people who call themselves real estate agents take the profession seriously,” she said.
“I think the declining members of NAR … there’s a lot wrapped up in there. But I think that fewer people are thinking that this is either a quick buck, like watching the reality TV shows and thinking that it’s an easy way to make money and finding out that that is absolutely not the case, or people harkening back to COVID-era when you didn’t even need to market a home, understanding that that’s not reality and that actually this is a business that takes a really high level of skill, expertise and dedication is a fantastic thing.”
Email Lillian Dickerson