Carol Yanagi Hayashi

Carol Yanagi Hayashi has spent more than 30 years in real estate, starting as a real estate paralegal and then about 25 years as an agent on Oahu, working with buyers and sellers alike. She stays personally involved from preparation through closing.

For a seller, that starts before the listing goes up. Carol has built her own network of cleaners, contractors, painters, landscapers, and attorneys, the same people she uses on her own properties, and she stays hands-on while they get the home prepped and ready to go. At the same time, she goes through the file herself, looking for issues and getting anything questionable to the attorneys early, so the listing and the closing both run clean.

For a buyer, it starts before they commit. Carol reads the condo documents, the AOAO minutes, the reserve study, and the leasehold terms: the pages that decide whether a place is a good idea, and the ones most buyers never get through. Anything she finds, her client hears about while there is still room to walk away.

Both habits come from the same place. Carol began her career as a Legislative Aide to Representative David Y. Ige at the Hawaii State Legislature, then spent years as a paralegal at Ashford & Wriston, Case & Lynch, and Chun, Kerr, Dodd, Beaman & Wong, drafting the deeds, mortgages, leases, and exhibits that sit underneath every transaction. She learned early what a clean file looks like and what a messy one costs.

Her clients tend to describe her the same way: helpful and knowledgeable, in touch at every step, and willing to go above and beyond what the job asks.

Today Carol is a REALTOR® with Locations and carries a Hawaii broker's license, a level above the salesperson license most agents hold. She still works every deal herself, so clients get that qualification without being handed off to a team.

Carol was born in Chicago and grew up in Pearl City, graduating from Pearl City High School and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She raised three sons on Oahu while serving as a PTO officer at Moanalua and Pearlridge Elementary and volunteering at Aiea High School, Moanalua's Scout Troop 9, and the Punahou Carnival. Two of her sons earned Eagle Scout, and all three are now college graduates starting careers of their own, so she knows firsthand what young professionals are up against in this market. She has won LeadingRE referral awards two years running, the Global Referral Award in 2025 and the Agent Referral Achievement Award in 2026, for helping clients buy and sell outside Hawaii. In 2025, she was also named Locations Foundation Volunteer of the Year.

Buying or selling a home is one of the biggest things most people ever do, and 100+ sales in, Carol still treats every one of them that way. Her goal is for every client to look back on it as a good memory.