Top Small Workplace: CENTURY 21 Stein Posner gives its agents ‘wings’

BOCA RATON — Adam Stein leads his company’s Monday morning meetings with a prowess: He elevates his voice, peppers curse words into his presentation and poses quizzical inquiries and hypotheticals to his agents the way a passionate professor might to an engaged class of students.

“How present are you?” “Did you get results?” “What is the one thing you need to change or stop doing that’s going to make a difference for you?”

Stein is the co-owner and president of CENTURY 21 Stein Posner, a real estate company recognized as the top ranked small workplace in the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s Top Workplaces competition for the second year in a row. Small workplaces are defined as those with 124 employees or fewer, and this year, 103 small workplaces participated in the competition. 

During a recent Monday morning team meeting, the company’s agents crowded both a Zoom screen and the small meeting room in the company’s office nestled in the Boca Corporate Center.

“You can act on life, or life will act on you,” Stein said to them, one of the many mantras he shared.

The company was initially founded as just Stein Posner in 2013 and became a franchise of CENTURY 21 in 2019. Now, it employs 94 real estate agents, or Realtors, and they range in age from early 20s to early 70s, Stein said, conducting about 50 transactions a month — put more simply, helping people find homes.

The agents agree: The company’s culture is what keeps them working there.

“This is my family away from my family,” said Realtor Joan Alpert, who has been with CENTURY 21 Stein Posner for seven years.

The team brings an “empowerment” that catapults the real estate agents to excel through personal coaching, mentoring and support, said Lori Porvin, a Realtor for nearly three years.

“They give you the tools and help you to guide you through the process, to really grow,” she said.

This guidance gives the agents “wings” to then go forth and support their own clients.

“When you’re working with your customer, they do feel like they can put their weight on you,” Porvin said. “It’s person to person, it’s not just buyer, seller to agent. We’re people, and there’s a relationship to be had aside from real estate, whether we’re asking about grandchildren or children, whatever it may be.”

Realtor Nicole Perdicaro’s favorite part of working at Stein Posner can be summed up in one word: “Adam.”

Perdicaro, who often walks into work armed with her infant daughter, Bella, said Stein’s coaching helps her reframe her thoughts and communications to take her transactions from “hopes and maybes” to final sales.

The mother of four said she would be unable to work and care for her children without the support provided by the CENTURY 21 Stein Posner team. Before Bella, she used to bring her now 2-year-old son into work, too.

“It was just kind of expected. … When Nikki has her baby, baby will be here until baby goes to school,” she said.

Much of what Stein preaches centers around individual betterment, which then transcends to being well-equipped to give customers the highest quality of service.

“This is a personal development organization,” he said. “We simply use real estate as the vehicle to help people grow and become what they’re capable of.”

Stein’s office bookshelf is only a further testament of that sentiment, lined with color-coded philosophy and self-help books.

The company’s commitment is ensuring people are “living their best life possible,” said Ron Posner, the company’s co-owner, CFO and productivity coach.

The company houses eight staffers with job titles such as “director of agent experience” and “director of happiness,” to further provide personalized help and inspiration to each real estate agent.

Given the housing market’s rather cantankerous conditions, including the affordable housing crisis and high interest rates on mortgages, Posner said their team works to educate and assist not only their agents but the consumers, too.

“We’re constantly looking for different avenues and different ways to help people buy and sell homes, and obviously educating them on those processes makes a huge difference,” he said.

The agents are helping people of all kinds find homes: first-time homebuyers, people looking to downsize, migrants from the northeast, people looking for a bigger space.

“It’s really across the board,” Stein said.

And why does Stein believe the company was selected as the Top Small Workplace for the second year in a row?

The team has “leveled up,” the mentorship program has improved, and they have “continued to attract high-quality human beings,” he said.

“Once you hit No. 1, you don’t want to be No. 2 or less,” he said. “The real magic in our organization is in the collective genius of all the other human beings.”