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.”

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In 2021, Neda Navab said her role at Compass was all about “the long game.”

At the time, Navab was the brokerage’s eastern region president and was riding the high of a successful initial public offering, which had given Compass the momentum — and capital — to further round out its end-to-end platform and expand into new regions.

“It all comes back to the strategy of making sure that being able to buy and sell a home is as simple and pleasant of an experience as possible for the agent, and for the buyer and seller on the other end of the transaction,” she told Inman that December. “We’re staying focused on that [goal] through whatever 2022 may bring us.”

Neda Navab | Compass

Fast forward to today, Navab is now settling into her new role as Compass’ president. The first priority on her list is to host 100 agent events in her first 100 days, all with the goal of tapping into the heartbeat of the brokerage’s mission: the agents.

“I was in Greenwich yesterday morning, Westport yesterday evening. I’ll be in Pennsylvania next week. You know, just hitting the road across the country,” she said. “As Compass grows in size and as Robert [Reffkin] steps into the role leading [parent company] Compass International Holdings, leaders like myself have to get closer to the field, closer to the ground, closer to the agents … This is a time of a lot of change for the industry, and it’s still a hard market to practice real estate. Our real estate professionals need our support.”

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Inman: It’s been 4 years since our last conversation, and a lot has changed since then. You started as Robert’s chief of staff in 2018, and the last time we talked, you were a regional president. How are you thinking about your journey to where you are now?

Navab: I’ll tell you something, actually quite interesting. I would say my journey into Compass started decades ago for two reasons.

So one, it’s actually quite poignant this week. My parents were both born and raised in Iran. And in 1979, my mom had to flee Iran because of the Islamic Revolution. She landed in Boston without a dollar to her name, working behind the counter at a Dunkin’ Donuts, but turned that job opportunity into another and another and ended up practicing real estate when I was a young girl.

So I got the opportunity to sit shotgun to a real estate professional when I was little, which really developed my respect for the profession and the opportunity it can unlock for a family and a community.

And then, funny enough, Robert and I have known each other for over 20 years. We met as students up at Columbia. And so as you can imagine, once you meet Robert, you know, he’s unforgettable, right? He’s incredible at keeping in touch with people, and we kept in touch over the years. And then in 2018, he reached out to me about this opportunity to come join Compass. It was a really full-circle moment. I have to be honest with you. I wasn’t looking for a chief of staff opportunity, but when I sat down with him, knowing him from before and knowing how hard it is to be a real estate professional, it struck me how agent-centric he was. So I took a leap of faith.

How did that experience inform what you’re doing now?

I’ll tell you, it is the most fun and demanding role at Compass. We have a number of leaders around the company now who started or at some point in time were Robert’s chief of staff. Your sole focus is to make Compass successful. You’re not thinking about things from any other specific department lens, and you develop just such a deep understanding of the core of the company, which is the real estate professional.

That’s behind the commitment I made Day 1 when I moved into the role: to attend and host 100 agent events in my first 100 days. What I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to them about is my mission to make sure that Compass is the best brokerage for delivering on the promises of a big firm, but with a boutique feel.

Big is our engine, but boutique is our edge.

Big is the power of the platform that we have built for them. Big is the incredible referral network they have. Big is the fact that we have an opportunity to partner with Redfin.com, a top-three search portal in the U.S., to give coming-soon listings more visibility and more options for sellers and their real estate professionals.

But boutique is our edge. It’s that feeling our real estate professionals get when they walk into the local office and the person at the front desk knows to ask about how their grandfather is doing, or how their closing went on Sunday, or whether the inspection came through as they hoped. And I think our real estate professionals deliver the power of big and boutique for their clients.

Let’s focus on the Redfin partnership. Are you looking at the coming months as a testing ground for the partnership? Maybe a litmus test for how it may evolve in the coming years?

What excites our agents most about the Redfin partnership so far is the opportunity to get 60 million monthly eyeballs on coming-soon listings without the digital baggage. The digital baggage includes days on market, public price drops, and status changes. It eliminates the risk of launching your listing and testing the market during the coming-soon phase. And so, from a homeowner’s standpoint, that’s fantastic.

I can launch my listing. I can have it appear on a top portal. I can get feedback. I can adjust. And then, if I choose to launch the listing more publicly, with the benefit of having had that coming-soon period without any of that digital baggage.

And by the way, because Redfin during that coming-soon period has the listing agent on the listing, the agent who knows the most about the home is able to speak to the buyers to answer the questions they have about the home, right? I think there’s a lot of excitement among sellers and our listing agents about the opportunity this unlocks. Hopefully, it will bring more inventory online ahead of the spring market.

Our time is running short, so let’s end today’s conversation by talking about broader industry trends. At ICNY last month, artificial intelligence and consolidation were at the top of the list, and Compass’ acquisition of Anywhere certainly drove much of the conversation about the latter. How do these trends fit into your decision-making?

All roads lead back to the real estate professional for us, right? I’ll take AI as one example. We have focused on building out training so that agents can leverage the tools available to sharpen their skills and better serve their clients.

There’s an example I shared earlier today, one of our agents in Westport, Connecticut, Susan Vanech. I was on Instagram the other day, and she posted this phenomenal video that just pulled me in, so I sent her a message saying, ‘Great video.’ She responded and said, ‘I scripted the entire thing using AI, not only the words that I said, but I asked the AI to tell me how to walk, what to do with my hands, what part of the home to be in, like literally to direct me.’ And it really showed because the quality was 10 out of 10.

And so our focus is just making sure we are leveraging all the best practices that the incredible agents around the country have and sharing them across the board. As I said, the best ideas come from the agents, so patterning off of how they’re using these apps has been a critical starting point for us.

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Compass CEO Robert Reffkin appeared on stage earlier this month for the first day of Inman Connect New York. In conversation with session moderator (and Inman founder) Brad Inman, Reffkin discussed his company’s recent merger with Anywhere, proving his doubters wrong and his take on major real estate entities.

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“I don’t think any agent, at any company, should have to pay NAR if you don’t want to,” Reffkin argued on stage. “I don’t think any agent at any company should get fined by their MLS. This doesn’t happen in any other industry. There is no association that is fining their own people. This is not normal. You should not be restricted. You should be able to market however your sellers want. And the theme of this year will be not private listings, it’ll be ‘how are we fighting to make private listings public.’”

Read Inman’s full coverage of the session here, and watch video of his appearance on stage above.