In 1991, Donna Duhe was strolling to brunch with friends from high school when she spotted smoke billowing near her home. Just six months into life as a homeowner, Duhe anxiously rushed back toward her Oakland, Calif., house.
Emergency personnel had cordoned off the area, stopping Duhe in her tracks. Off in the distance, amid the haze, she spotted something that shocked her.
“There was someone on top of the roof, and I thought, ‘my God,’ and it was Kevin,” Duhe recalls.
Thirty-five-year-old Kevin Brown, her real estate agent and longtime friend, was standing there spraying water on the house to prevent it from catching fire.
It was Oct. 19, and the Oakland-Berkley Hills firestorm was on a path to consume everything it touched. The catastrophic wildfire, exacerbated by five years of drought, killed 25 people, destroyed about 3,400 houses, burnt 1,500 acres to a crisp and caused $1.5 billion in damages.
Duhe’s home was spared.
Going Above and Beyond
Like so many first-time home buyers, Duhe had been full of apprehension and questions. Kevin had answered each of them patiently. When the fire broke out, Kevin’s thoughts turned to Duhe, his long-time friend. He knew she wasn’t home—he’d been invited to brunch too but had declined because of work obligations—and he didn’t want to see everything she’d worked for go up in flames.
He jumped into action, driving to Duhe’s home, breaking through the door, and making his way to the roof with a hose in hand.
“I'm standing there for a good half an hour or so, and then I see this car coming down the street and I'm thinking, ‘that's my car,’” she says.
Kevin had found Duhe’s car keys, loaded the car with as many personal effects as he could, and drove to safety.
“I was actually going on a business trip the next day, which he knew about, so he put my computer in the car, and he put a lot of clothes in the car,” she recalls.
“I was shocked and kind of in tears too, to see that he would do that for me,” Duhe, godmother of Kevin’s daughter, says.
In November, at NAR NXT, the REALTOR® Experience, Kevin will officially become 2026 president of the National Association of REALTORS®. To Duhe, the incident speaks volumes about Kevin’s commitment to his clients, and the real estate industry at large.
“It took a lot of hard work for Kevin to get where he is right now, and that is not new to Kevin,” she says, reflecting on his ascent at NAR. “And so, as the new president, that’s one thing people can count on and believe in—that Kevin will work hard, he’ll work hard for each individual. He’ll work hard for every community, every homeowner, every prospective homeowner. That’s his DNA.”
To understand Kevin’s fierce work ethic, you need to understand the pioneers who came before him.
Education Begets Opportunity
His values are deeply influenced by his parents, who were, likewise, deeply affected by their upbringing in Mississippi. Through them, he inherited a profound appreciation for how education begets opportunity.
Kevin is three generations removed from slavery; his maternal great grandparents were enslaved in the deep south.
Kevin’s mother, Fannie, grew up in Jackson, Miss., and her father stressed the importance of education. He owned and operated a small grocery store which afforded the family relative stability. That is until Fannie’s father co-signed a loan to help a friend.
“That friend skipped town, and they lost their home, and they lost his store,” Kevin recounts. “That taught my mother at a very young age a very valuable lesson about financial literacy.”
About 70 miles north and 10 years earlier, Kevin’s father, Bill Sr., grew up on the family farm in Kosciusko, Miss.
“When he started first grade, he was 15 years old,” Kevin says. “He had to find a way to pay for part of his education, and he did that by selling milk and butter to the school.”
He continued on to high school and Alcorn State University, where he was working when he met Fannie. For two young black adults growing up in the south during Jim Crow, education didn’t just serve as the backdrop of their love story, but a ticket to a better life.
“My parents were brought up in a very harsh environment, and they worked hard their entire lives,” Kevin says. “They got into the middle class, and they definitely did not want to raise their kids in the same environment. So, they tried to put us in the best schools, to give us the best education we possibly could have.”
Breaking Barriers
Kevin and his older brother Bill Jr., NAR’s 2017 President, were the first black children to attend an all-white school in Piedmont, Calif.
The elder brother says he can still close his eyes and recall preparing for his first day—his mom fussing over his hair and outfit, checking for wrinkles.
“She says, ‘Bill, this is going to be quite an experience for you. Just hang in there, but it’s going to toughen you up a lot,’” Bill Jr. recalls.
“It was tough, but I learned a lot of things in that school, and I especially learned how to treat other people,” Kevin says.
It was an important lesson he learned every day from his father as well, a World War II veteran who discovered during his time in the Navy how to work with everyone.
Kevin says his father was the first black agent to join the Berkeley association (now the Bridge Association of REALTORS®) and “one of the first things that happened after he went there for orientation: Somebody followed him out of the building and said, ‘don't you have another organization that you can join?’”
“My father just ignored that and moved on,” he adds. “His office, it was right on the demarcation line between a white area and a black area at the time, and he had clients in both. He worked with whites, he worked with blacks, he worked with Hispanics, Asians—he worked with everybody.”
Bill Sr. took the high road a lot.
“My father did break a lot of barriers, and he never sacrificed his own integrity in doing so,” he says. “Even when he would lose a listing because of the color of his skin or somebody would make a racial remark to him, he’d just turn the other cheek, walk away and move on to the next customer.”
Kevin believes those lessons will help guide his tenure.
“The National Association of REALTORS®, it's really a microcosm of society,” he says. “And so I think that the way I was brought up, where I treat everybody equally and fairly, it's going to work out well, because I'm going to treat everybody the same. Everybody matters at the National Association of REALTORS®, even people that disagree or have a varying opinion, their opinion counts. It matters.”
Intergenerational Wealth
When Kevin preaches about the transformative effect real estate can have on a person and their descendants, it comes from a place of complete sincerity because he is living proof of that impact.
His parents aspired to own a home, but because of redlining and discriminatory covenants, conditions and restrictions—CC&Rs—in the mid-1950s, they were forced to purchase property in a less desirable location. In classic Brown family fashion, they persisted.
Later, Bill Sr. discovered that there was a plot of land in foreclosure in a sought-after area, Thankfully, the owner didn’t care about the color of Bill Sr.’s skin.
“They purchased the lot and built our first family home all cash, out of their hard-earned savings,” Kevin says.
He is forever grateful for the opportunities his parents gave him, especially considering their rough starts.
“It was a very powerful experience when I went back to my mother's family home [in 1963] and knowing just the progression, the transformative impact that real estate, the difference it made in their lives and where they started from and where they are today. I experienced it because of my parents and the intergenerational wealth that they provided to me. I want every American to experience that.”
It’s Personal
It’s easy to see just how much Kevin adored his father. He was dad, mentor and later—boss—rolled into one.
A memory sticks out from one summer during college. Bill Sr. invited him to tag along on an outing.
“He said, ‘One of my clients is in trouble. He’s going to lose his home.’ And very naively, I said, ‘Why don’t you wait until the house goes into foreclosure and then you can buy it and flip it and make a profit?’”
Kevin’s father said he was going to lend the client, whom he trusted, some money because “the most important thing is a roof over your head.”
“He’s going to pay me back,” Kevin recalls his father saying. “I have his house as security in case he doesn’t, and he can keep his family home.”
“And that had a huge impact on me,” he adds. “Number one, I felt shame because of what I’d suggested, but secondly, I realize now what it actually means to be a REALTOR®, a member of this association. We put our client’s interest over and above our own.”
That interaction turned Kevin on his axis. Pivoting his career track from biology to business, he would go on to work shoulder to shoulder with his brother and father, joining his dad’s residential brokerage, William H. Brown Realtor, in 1977. They purchased a franchise a few years later, becoming Better Homes Realty Rockridge, and expanding into the commercial space.
On his first day, Bill Sr. sat him down and said, “Kevin, you’re going to earn a great living off of real estate commissions, but you’re going to retire off your investments. So, number one, you have to buy a house, and number two, you have to invest in real estate.”
Both brothers took that lesson to heart. Kevin purchased his first investment property that same year and he and his brother would go on to invest in over 2,000 housing units during their careers.
When he first began investing in rental properties, Kevin recalls spending his evenings making simple repairs and painting vacant units until one in the morning.
He became a do-it-yourselfer, and learned the electrical trade, framing and carpentry, thinking it would add to his knowledge after starting a property management company.
“When I received an estimate, I really understood what I was paying for,” he says.
Between brokering residential and commercial transactions, investing, property managing, and familiarizing himself in the fundamental housing trades, Kevin became a real estate renaissance man and would distinguish himself in the industry.
Investor Turned Activist
Those investments directly led the brothers to recognize the importance of advocacy.
Kevin says they slowly saw their rights as property owners begin to slip. Rent control proposals brought eviction challenges, which led to public safety threats.
“The highest rents are in rent-controlled cities,” Kevin says. “It doesn’t work, it’s never worked. It stymies investment and new construction as well. People think of rent control as just controlling the rent, but there’s a whole group of policies underneath that umbrella that really are anti-homeownership policies—they're barriers to homeownership.”
The Brown brothers saw involvement at the Oakland Association of REALTORS® as a way to directly protect their investment.
“Our property rights were being eroded, and we want to have more private property rights, not less,” Kevin says.
Kevin Brown served as president of the organization in 1995. (The association later merged with the Berkley association to become the Bridge Association of REALTORS®). Two decades later, he was president of the California Association of REALTORS® (Six years after his brother held the same role).
Kevin is particularly proud of the work he did helping get the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2014 passed. It revised many of the policies in the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, which moved the insurance rate from the subsidized rate to the actuarial rate, and restabilized the flood insurance market.
He was instrumental in getting California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters to sign a petition to repeal her own bill.
“I personally met with Maxine Waters and our leadership team from California,” Kevin says. “She signed the petition and after she signed, when we went on our annual congressional trip, we got the majority of the California congressional delegation to sign this petition. NAR worked with Judy Biggert and the Republicans, and at a time when nothing was being passed, Barack Obama signed that bipartisan bill into law.”
At the same time, he was deeply engaged with volunteering at the national level to prioritize NAR’s advocacy efforts to protect consumers.
“I got involved with the National Association of REALTORS® because I saw how they were shaping public policy and how that public policy was impacting real estate,” he says. “A lot of the transactions I was involved in, whether it was a 30-year-mortgage or a 1031 exchange, these are the things that NAR is trying to preserve. They are trying to preserve home ownership and also investment property ownership, and that is the American dream.”
Since volunteering on NAR’s commercial finance committee in 1996, Kevin has served in more than 60 different appointments at the association. He’s also testified before congress three times—twice, in fact, in one day—on GSE reform, tax reform and the impact of tax reform on the middle class.
Back to Business
Kevin is building off his predecessor, Kevin Sears’, “back to basics” mantra.
Amid a challenging two years, Sears was focused on laying the foundation of the association, through balancing consecutive budgets, preserving the association through a legal risk assessment, enhancing member experience, and rebuilding relationships with brokerages.
Building on that foundation, Brown is eager to get “back to business.” That means focusing on activities that will benefit members’ businesses directly like helping consumers navigate costly insurance premiums and explore flexible financing options, advocating for less restrictive zoning to encourage new development, identifying tech tools and market intelligence that will grow members’ business opportunities, and “leveling up” areas where NAR already excels like advocacy and research.
“[Members are] going to see that we’re serious in helping them get to their next transaction,” he says. “That’s where our focus is.”
Those closest to Kevin explain why he’s the leader to vault the association to its potential. They describe him as smart, studious, dependable, principled, eloquent and an incredibly hard worker.
“Back to business is setting the standard,” NAR 2026 VP of Advocacy Asa Fleming says. “It’s setting the bar for years to come. And so, refocusing back on business is where our members need to be.”
“Kevin is willing to dig in, do the work and make it happen,” Bill Jr. Says.
