For real estate professionals, succession planning can be easy to postpone. The business is personal, the work is demanding and many agents remain deeply involved long after they could have stepped away.
Lucia Cooke’s transition to the next generation of her North Carolina real estate business is one built over decades — with her daughter Allison Zimmerman involved for as long as she can remember.
Cooke Residential, serving the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, has operated independently under its own brand since 2014. Cooke and Zimmerman are now moving toward a shared leadership structure, with Zimmerman serving as broker in charge and the two working as co-owners.
Zimmerman said the transition was not a last-minute decision. It grew out of the role she had been preparing to assume since entering real estate.
“I think, in many ways, I’ve always succession planned,” she told HousingWire. “First, I jumped into this business 22 years ago. It was always sort of the plan that I would eventually take the reins. We’ve been able to share these reins, and we’ve been able to create an incredible working partnership over the course of the 22 years. I’ve been watching [Cooke] in this business since I was five.”
Cooke’s path into real estate began with a different career in mind.
She had earned a master’s degree in education and initially thought she would become an appraiser.
“I went to [University of North Carolina] and started taking the appraisal classes,” said Cooke. “After I’d finished the classes, someone that I knew approached me and said, ‘You like people, you know people. Why not just come work part-time in real estate?’ Well, there’s no such thing as part-time.”
The work stuck. Cooke held tenure with several companies including REMAX and Prudential before deciding that her established reputation could support a firm of her own — starting Cooke Residential in 2014.
“It was a little anxious in 2014 because there weren’t many people, not anyone else, really, who I knew wo had done this,” Cooke said. “But it turned out to be a great move for us, and we had quite a successful year, our very first year out, so that worked well.”
Cooke and Zimmerman said their firm accounted for roughly $32 million in transaction volume last year. While Cooke determines a formal timeline to step away from her business, the mother-daughter team plan to continue working together and bring on new agents.
Recruiting is one of the things that we’ve really wanted to get back to focusing on as we move into Q4 and Q1 of next year,” Zimmerman said. “We want the kind of agents that we would trust with clients that we’ve been dealing with for 40-some-odd years. For us, it’s not a numbers game. It’s all about personality.
“It’s all about meshing with what we believe in in terms of core values as a company and as individuals.”
Growing up inside the business
Zimmerman served as broker in charge of a local REMAX office for several years while waiting her turn in the succession plan.
The current transition is not a clean break for Cooke. Instead, the two are shifting responsibilities while continuing to work together.
“I still have the years of experience and knowledge that I can pull from with her and say, ‘Hey, Mom, I’m dealing with this situation, and I’m banging my head against too many options, too many thoughts, too many things,’” said Zimmerman. “It’s immensely useful to have that professional banter back and forth where you can boil it down and say, ‘What’s the real problem? What are the options? How do we hit it?’”
For business owners planning their own succession, overlap of institutional knowledge can prove to be invaluable.
Zimmerman said the most important element in a succession plan is trust — not just within a family but between any partners responsible for carrying a company forward.
“At least with my family, [trust] has kind of been built in,” she said. “That hasn’t been an issue. That’s something that’s always been the baseline. But I think that’s true across the board. I think that for any kind of business, you have to trust your partners.
“You have to trust who you’re working with. You have to trust who’s going to move the ball forward in the future — and that who you’re working with has your back.”
Never stop learning
Cooke also sees education as a critical part of preparing the next generation.
The mother and daughter have pursued advanced education and professional programs — including Zimmerman’s participation in a yearlong Harvard University program.
Cooke said the goal was not simply to collect credentials but to stay informed about what is changing in the industry.
“I know we were one of the first in the whole area to have our own internet presence,” she said. “We were one of the first to do a magazine that was going to be mailed annually, one of the first to do brochures that are like magazines — a magazine on local interest stuff. We’ve just always tried to be looking forward.”
That forward-looking approach is now being applied to newer challenges, including artificial intelligence and the enormous amount of real estate information available online.
“It’s so important to able to explain to people in a real way what the data looks like and how things are changing,” said Zimmerman. “I will admit, staying on top of the education piece of that is part of what helps you stay in front of what is coming next and what is new, and how to then represent and put that in front of your clients in the best way possible.”
A family business shaped by three owners
Cecil Cooke Jr., the family patriarch, was also part owner of Cooke Residential and played an important role in its development before his death in June 2025.
He worked with Lucia through earlier stages of the business, including the years at RE/MAX and Prudential, before retired from active involvement during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“He was very much a part of this business,” said Zimmerman. “His presence was critical for so many years that it would seem false to leave him out of the story. He also had a fairly large stint at Wells Fargo as a mortgage officer, so he could speak to that side of the equation, as well. Before that, he’d also worked with a local small homebuilder.”
At Cecil’s suggestion, the firm had homes appraised and professionally staged before putting them on the market, Lucia added.
“Everyone was cutting back on advertising [during the 2008 market crash],” she said. “Nobody was doing anything. They didn’t want to spend any money because nobody was buying. I said, ‘Okay, if we’re going down, we’re going down blazing. So, we did our magazine, and Cecil was the one who came up with that idea, too.”
And for Zimmerman, who has watched the business since she was five, the opportunity is both professional and personal — taking the reins of a company she has known for most of her life while carrying the legacy of those closest to her.
