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When Greg Kiely, AHWD, C2EX, current chair of the Cape Cod & Islands MLS, sees a need, he acts—in a big-picture way. For his proactive approach and commitment to industry-wide learning, Kiely was named a 2025 Fair Housing Champion by the National Association of REALTORS®. He was recognized at an April 10 Fair Housing Month event hosted by NAR.
In 2005, when he was relocating from the Baltimore area to Boston, Kiely didn’t feel he was getting the representation he needed. In a move that he says has been a recurring pattern in his life, Kiely saw a need and filled it. He became a real estate agent with the mission to better support consumers. When the 2007–2008 financial crisis hit, Kiely saw that agents were clamoring for more help from their companies. He took a job in agent services to ensure agents in his company had the hands-on support they needed. And when he became president of Cape Cod & Islands Association of REALTORS® in 2020, he saw what was unfolding down the coast in Long Island, N.Y., and vowed to make a difference for his own members.
Long Island was reeling from Newsday’s fair housing discrimination exposé, published in late 2019. “We had to look in the mirror,” says Kiely, now chair of Cape Cod & Islands MLS. “Could this piece of journalism have been written about Cape Cod, too?”
With median single-family home prices well over $700,000 and condos above $500,000, Cape Cod is a challenging housing market for workforce residents. Bias can further erode folks’ efforts to find a place to live. “In my area, some people say families with children shouldn’t live next to me or people who work at local shops and restaurants shouldn’t live next to me,” Kiely says. “We wanted to get ahead of these issues and make sure our members didn’t fall into these traps.”
Secret Sauce: Collaboration
Kiely set out to help the peninsula’s residents overcome hurdles toward achieving homeownership.
“We needed to redefine what it meant to be a real estate professional on Cape Cod; we wanted to add more education and a higher level of professionalism so we could differentiate our folks,” he says. “We can look in the mirror and say we’re helping communities, not just lining our pockets.”
The result: In 2021, the local association changed its bylaws to require members to complete fair housing training every three years. It became the first REALTOR® association in Massachusetts, and one of a few nationwide, to adopt the requirement.
Kiely’s quick to point out it was not a one-man effort. He called on association staff with subject matter expertise to help drive the training initiative forward. “Greg is a leader. He creates a space for people with more knowledge, including staff, to do their job,” CCIAOR CEO Ryan Castle says. “And he brought different groups to the table to talk through their issues.”
Adds Castle: “The change came from our strategic initiatives, where we focused not only on housing production but also inclusivity and education on fair housing laws.”
A National Training Goal
Kiely didn’t stop at the local level. The goal was an organization of professionals across the country creating better communities. “We all need to be an advocate for those not in the room—or who don’t know the room even exists,” he says.
He spearheaded the drive for an ongoing fair housing education requirement for NAR members, which NAR’s Board of Directors approved in 2023, and which went into effect in January 2025. Alongside any state fair housing training requirements, members must now complete two hours of fair housing training every three years in tandem with the Code of Ethics training cycle.
Although he was an advocate for the national requirement, leading the charge wasn’t his ambition. In 2021, the same year that CCIAOR’s training requirement went into effect, NAR’s Executive Committee tasked the Membership Policy and Board Jurisdiction Committee with exploring the education issue nationally. Kiely, who was serving on that committee, volunteered his Cape Cod experience and was promoted to lead the creation of the new standard. “Never did I expect they would say, ‘Chair the new work group on mandatory fair housing education,’ which was made up of representatives from five different committees, each with a variety of agendas,” he says.
In a series of meetings, the group reached agreement on intent but worries remained about the group’s recommended timing. “Association Executives had serious concerns about how [a fair housing training requirement] would be implemented, tracked and enforced at their level,” especially given their workload for managing Code of Ethics training, he says.
Kiely worked through initial concerns on the implementation timeline. He achieved consensus among AEs, the NAR Executive Committee and the Membership Policy and Board Jurisdiction Committee, setting the stage for Board of Directors approval and 2025 implementation of the new education requirement.
“This is a story about how all these different groups [rose above] challenges and roadblocks to agree this needed to be done,” Kiely says. “It wouldn’t have happened unless we had that big coalition.”
Bias Doesn’t Make You a Bad Person
Kiely says his passion for fair housing stems from a recognition that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. “We all believe we’re informed and educated. But we don’t have a mechanism for what we don’t see about ourselves.”
Such is the case with bias, he says. It appears implicitly and unintentionally in every aspect of our lives. “I use one gas station because that’s what my parents used.”
Training like NAR’s “Bias Override: Overcoming Barriers to Fair Housing,” one of the course options that meets the fair housing requirement, can help you interrupt unconscious and stereotypical thinking to create a greater connection with the community around you.
“Bias doesn’t identify you as a bad person. It’s been eye opening to look at the bias inside me,” Kiely says. “Brokerages can get cliquey. As a leader I’ve moved myself to companies that are more geographically and socioeconomically diverse. And in evaluating talent to join us, I say, ‘Who out there can teach us what we don’t know and bring us credibility and authenticity in the communities we don’t know?’ Today my office rosters are much more representative of the people we serve.”
The bottom line for the fair housing education mandate? Kiely believes it’s exemplary of NAR member value. “We did something significant that adds to our integrity, legacy and promise to the communities we serve.”
