About Carol
I came to Hawaiʻi as an investor.
I stayed because it became home.
I’m Carol Porter, a Hawaiʻi Island REALTOR® and longtime real-estate investor with particular expertise in the Kohala Coast and its resort communities. I work with buyers, sellers, and investors throughout Hawaiʻi Island, bringing together long experience living and investing here with the analytical discipline of my earlier career.
I’ve been investing in real estate since the late 1970s and made my first investment in Hawaiʻi in 1999. I began spending part of each year on Hawaiʻi Island in 2001, moved here full time in 2004, and have lived on the Kohala Coast ever since.
Real estate is now my profession, but it isn’t where my professional experience began. I spent more than three decades in technology and business, eventually founding and running a technology consulting company. That work taught me to research complicated problems, manage a great many moving parts, negotiate, ask questions until the answers make sense, and explain what I find clearly enough for someone to make a decision.
Those skills turned out to translate remarkably well to Hawaiʻi real estate.
Carol Porter
REALTOR® · RS-87584 · HI
Since 1999
Hawaiʻi Island real-estate investor
Since 2001
Hawaiʻi Island resident, first part time
Since 2004
Full-time Kohala Coast resident
30+ years
Business strategy and technology
REALTOR®
Hawaiʻi RS-87584
Clients island-wide
with special depth on Kohala Coast
Before real estate
Three decades of figuring out what people actually need.
Long before the modern web emerged, I worked in networking, office automation, and user-centered software design, helping organizations make technology more useful and accessible.
At Data General, I helped define CEO™, an office automation platform, and became its North American Product Sales Manager during its first year. In that role, I worked as an executive consultant on major sales opportunities alongside local sales management, sales representatives, and clients.
In the early 1990s, I founded Design Matters Inc., a web design, development, and technology company, where I led teams working on complicated internet, intranet, extranet, content-management, e-commerce, and database-driven applications.
That work taught me a particular discipline: investigate before you decide, explain what you find in plain language, and never ask someone to commit to something they don’t understand. It’s the same discipline I bring to real estate.
Our projects included online engineering design applications for National Semiconductor, the first web-based package tracking system for DHL USA, employee intranets for 3Com, Raychem, the National Cancer Institute, Verifone, and Robert Mondavi Winery, full service B2B e-commerce site for Airgas’ extensive product catalog, applications for the State of California, online training infrastructures, application development for BroadVision Group, the U.S. Air Force software technology support center, Astaga!, Indonesia’s first major web portal, database driven sites for more than a dozen internet start-ups (each funded by Silicon Valley Venture Capital firms), and the first online Pharmacy Benefits Management System for Advance Paradigm (acquired by CVS).
In their Intranet Design Annual: Best Intranets of 2003, the Nielsen Norman Group recognized Design Matters’ integrated web, intranet, and extranet platform that pioneered capabilities now common in modern workplace collaboration systems.
The Nielsen Norman Group has continued to cite Design Matters’ award-winning intranet as an example in subsequent publications, reprinting the entire case study in its 2019 report Best Knowledge-Intensive Business Intranets 2001-2018
How I work
Investigate before you decide.
Explain what you find in plain language. Don’t ask someone to commit to something they don’t understand.
Hawaiʻi real estate can involve questions about lava zones, water, climate, zoning, permits, insurance, HOA rules, maintenance, and other property-specific issues. My job isn’t to make those questions disappear. It’s to help identify the ones that matter, investigate what can be established, and explain what the findings mean.
The goal is straightforward: give you the information and perspective you need to make your own decision.
Life on Hawaiʻi Island
Still curious after more than two decades.
I spend time throughout Hawaiʻi Island, exploring its different districts and communities and paying attention to what makes each of them distinct. I enjoy the beach, walking at the nature park, cooking and eating with friends, and simply getting to know the place I call home. After more than two decades here, I’m still learning about it. There is always another road to take, another piece of history to discover, or something I thought I understood that turns out to be more complicated.
That curiosity carries into my work. Hawaiʻi Island is remarkably varied: its districts, communities, climates, landscapes, and ways of living can be very different from one another, sometimes within surprisingly short distances. Understanding those differences matters when you’re deciding not simply which property to buy, but where and how you want to live.
With aloha,
Carol Porter
Mission
“My mission is to help people make thoughtful, well-informed decisions about Hawaiʻi real estate by combining local knowledge, careful analysis, and genuine attention to what matters to each client.”