The past 12 months have been a year of growth and expansion for Coldwell Banker’s Dawn McKenna, a real estate agent with 15 years of experience. She became the No. 1 Individual Agent in Illinois among all brokers for Coldwell Banker, and she expanded her business beyond the Hinsdale area. In July, she launched the Dawn McKenna Group in downtown Chicago and Naples, Florida. In the four months that followed, her team of 12 produced $25 million in new business in those two markets alone.

Exciting for McKenna? Yes. Surprising? Not really.

“I’m not trying to take over the world. I’m just trying to serve my clients,” McKenna says, adding that most of the business she’s getting in these expansion markets are repeat clients that worked with her in Hinsdale previously. “People are coming to us because they’ve used us before, they’re comfortable with us, and they trust us.”

McKenna’s operating philosophy and promise is that she brings clients local expertise and global reach. Nobody knows Hinsdale the way McKenna does; just read her client reviews and you’ll see that. But her ability to tap into resources outside Hinsdale and the greater Chicago area is also unmatched. She’s part of the Luxury Alliance Group with Coldwell Banker, which is made up of the No. 1 agent from every affluent city in the world. The group meets quarterly, and member agents often share referrals back and forth.

McKenna also partners with Luxury Presence, marketing service and real estate referral company that works with an exclusive network of agents in places like Paris and London to help them market their businesses with gorgeous websites and other marketing projects. McKenna is one of only a handful of agents that are part of the official referral network and the only one in Illinois since access to Luxury Presence is by invite only.

The goal for the Dawn McKenna Group in 2018 is to leverage this power network to bring clients the best of the best: the best service, the best listings, the best buyers, the best industry knowledge, and so on. Beyond this network, McKenna also has something that’s hard to learn. She has the innate ability to understand trends and bring them to market for her clients before anyone else.

That’s what has made her so successful in Hinsdale. She knows what buyers and sellers want even before they do. “Right now, less is more,” McKenna says. “People are looking for ways to simplify their lives. They want to trim down everything; keep it simple and concise.”

This is translating into the home-buying experience.

This year’s trend? More people looking for smaller, more manageable homes.

“The luxury buyer still wants what they want, but they’ve gotten way pickier. I think the word luxury has changed,” she explains. “It used to be off-putting—fancy, untouchable. But I think we’re going to start seeing that comfortability is luxury. It’s still pleasing to the eye, with beautiful structure. But luxury is changing. It’s furniture that’s easy to sit in. It’s comfortable textures. It’s materials that are both beautiful and durable.”

And McKenna says there’s no better location that understands this changing definition of than Hinsdale.

“The best thing about selling in Hinsdale is that it’s a great place to live. There are so many amenities here, and the people are an incredible cornucopia of interesting, fun, and relatable people. It will always be the trendsetter,” she says. “It will always be the leader in high-end real estate.”

Dawn McKenna Group is located at 8 E. Hinsdale Avenue in Hinsdale, 630-546-3763, dawnmckennagroup.com.