|  | | | Guided by principles of trust, integrity and respect, we empower people to achieve their dreams. |  Intero Real Estate Services came to life in 2002 in the San Francisco Bay Area, founded by real estate veteran Gino Blefari who dreamed of building a better real estate brokerage, one that treated its agents and clients like valued customers.
Blefari had already built a name for himself in Silicon Valley when he launched Intero. In the nineties, he was co-founder of Contempto Realty, which he helped build into a $2.4 billion brokerage. Contempto was acquired by NRT, the parent company of Coldwell Banker, in 1997. Blefari stayed on as the president and chief operating officer. It then merged in 2001 with Coldwell Banker to form a 90-office, 4,000-agent strong brokerage with over $24 billion in combined sales. Blefari was promoted to senior vice president for NRT, and he worked with executives on a national level until the summer of 2002, when he broke away to start Intero. During those years, Blefari worked with many of the people who later helped him to found and build Intero: Bob Moles, John Thompson, Tom Tognoli, Brian Crane, Jerry Kiss, Kevin Moles, Terry Meyer, and Dawn Antonelli, to name a few.
In the summer of 2002, the Bay Area was in the middle of a recession and national and regional real estate giants Coldwell Banker and Alain Pinel dominated the market. Nobody could predict what was going to happen to home values. It wasn’t the most ideal environment in which to launch a startup, and many questioned Blefari’s boldness. Despite this, he pushed forward. He had a vision to build a different kind of real estate company that focused on more than corporate profits and selling houses, one that offered training, education and alternative support for its people, such as life coaching and health and fitness programs to help them grow into better individuals personally and professionally. Helping someone to become a better person on the whole, Blefari says, makes that individual more successful in business. This was the seed for Intero.
Within two years, the company was challenging the Bay Area’s most powerful brokerages for the top spot as Silicon Valley’s best real estate firm. In less than five, Intero had grown from one office to more than 63 offices, 2,200 agents and $5 billion in annual sales. Today, Intero has offices in California, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Nevada, Texas and Mexico. It has been named as the fastest growing real estate company in the nation, out of 80,000 brokerages (Realtor Magazine®, 2005) and the number one residential real estate brokerage in Silicon Valley (Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal, 2005).
Blefari credits Intero’s outstanding success to the company’s unique culture, which has helped Intero recruit the top agents and management in every market it enters. Intero, an Italian word that means “entire” or “whole,” is built around the philosophy of empowering people—clients, agents and employees—to achieve their dreams in all areas of their life. The company encourages its people to conduct themselves according to a core set of values that include integrity, loyalty, team, commitment, compassion, professionalism, enthusiasm, competency, innovation & entrepreneurship, open communication, friendship, fun, focus, self control, confidence, trust and respect.
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