WOMEN CEO REPORT

Colleen Barry

Gibson Sotheby's International Realty

As CEO of Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty, Colleen Barry has helped establish a new standard in the way of outstanding real estate service—one that’s upheld by a team of more than 500 top-performing professionals representing buyers and sellers throughout Massachusetts.

For more than twenty years, Colleen has strived to enrich the real estate profession through personalized business coaching, highly engaging training sessions and enlightening keynote speeches. She has led both marketing and productivity efforts during her tenure at Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty, spearheading a business planning curriculum to help the firm’s associates raise the bar as successful industry leaders. She is dedicated to holding professionals accountable to fulfill their greatness, inspiring positive habits, and exploring the findings of other disciplines to uncover new ideas—she particularly enjoys the philosophies of Seth Godin, Simon Sinek, Bob Burg, Stephen Covey, and Shawn Achor, to name a few.

During Colleen’s time on its leadership team, Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty has led the luxury residential market in Massachusetts with annual sales that have grown more than tenfold, reaching $3 billion in 2023. In 2002, she landed her first role at the brokerage as a receptionist, and in 2006 played an integral role in affiliating Gibson domain|domain with the global Sotheby’s International Realty brand. In 2015, Colleen checked off a big item on her bucket list and wrote “There Is No Such Thing As Luck,” a book distilling salient lessons in goal-setting, entrepreneurship, personal growth, and more. She is an Inman News contributor, has served as a guest on several podcasts, and in 2020 appeared in chapter one of Soundtracks by Jon Acuff—a Wall Street Journal bestseller. You can catch her interview on Acuff’s “All it Takes is a Goal” at acuff.me/atg14. She was named Boston Agent Magazine’s Industry MVP in 2022 and appeared in Kristine Newell’s “Habit of Grateful” in 2023.

A native New Englander, Colleen was born and raised in Connecticut and graduated from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She is a member of the National Association of REALTORS® and has taken executive courses at Harvard University and MIT. She is a member of the Pride Connect board. She currently resides with her family in Belmont, Massachusetts.