Brokerage
Coldwell Banker Commercial
Team Ukropina · 2,800+ professionals across the global CBC network. Kathi has been recognized in the Top 1% of CBC agents worldwide.
A non-traditional route into commercial real estate.
Kathi was born and raised in Pasadena, California, and lived in Hawaii for a few years as a young child. She found her way to commercial real estate via a non-traditional route. While attending the Annenberg School for Communications at USC, she worked in property management at Japanese Village Plaza in Little Tokyo, where her family designed, developed, and owned the iconic shopping center — a property she still draws on today when she sits across from family-business owners thinking about their own.
She went on to work at Arthur Andersen LLP for the Worldwide Director of the Entertainment & Hospitality Division, in the marketing department dedicated to the Entertainment team. After graduating USC, Kathi began a twenty-plus-year career in corporate America in the legal field, working for some of the most prestigious law firms in the country: Latham & Watkins, Munger Tolles & Olson, and WilmerHale.
"Kathi brings a unique perspective as having been the co-owner of various retail and hospitality ventures — including the famous Twin Palms restaurant, Big Daddy's Bar & Grill, and the Premier Jewelry Mart."
The other side of the deal.
Kathi truly enjoys working with business owners and entrepreneurs — partly because she has been one herself. She has been a co-owner of multiple retail and hospitality ventures, so when a tenant or buyer sits across from her wrestling with a build-out, a permit timeline, or a personal guarantee, they know she has lived those decisions firsthand.
That experience is reflected in her client list. She represented organizations like the Langham Huntington Hotel, Innova Medical Group, Boy Scouts of America, World of Dance Studios, and a long roster of family-held, founder-led, and non-profit businesses across Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley. Kathi specializes in office, retail, and medical office, and skillfully represents buyers and sellers as well as landlords and tenants.
A pathfinder.
Kathi is one of the most senior brokers in the Coldwell Banker Commercial network — and she takes the responsibility that comes with it seriously. Career-changers in their forties and fifties considering their own pivot reach out to her. New agents looking for a model. Anyone weighing whether commercial real estate is for them, looking for someone who has walked the path. She always picks up. In 2025, Coldwell Banker Commercial honored her with The Pathfinder Award — a national CBC recognition for exactly that work: paving the way. Kathi recently added another first: earning the SIOR designation, becoming the first woman at Coldwell Banker Commercial to hold it.
If this is you — already in commercial real estate, considering it as a second-act career, or trying to figure out what starting over actually requires — Kathi keeps that room open. Read more about her work as a pathfinder →
Family, roots, and the long view.
Last but not least, Kathi is a proud mother of two amazing children, Alexandria and Michael. Both are graduates of Arcadia High School — one graduated from the Marshall School of Business at USC, the other is a student at Cal State Los Angeles. The "long-view" approach Kathi brings to her clients' real estate decisions is the same one she has brought to raising her own family in this community.