Photograph by Kathy De La Torre

Christopher Trapani (left) is the new manager at Century 21 Seville Contempo Realtors, and assistant manager is Ryan Iwanaga.

Real Estate firm bounces back after mass exodus of its agents

By Nathan R. Huff

Following the loss of 40 Century 21 Seville Contempo Realtors, who followed their manager in a mass migration to Alain Pinel, the company has appointed a new manager and assistant manager at its Los Gatos office.

Lifelong valley resident and 10-year real estate veteran Chris Trapani was named branch manager, and longtime friend and Realtor Ryan Iwanaga was appointed as assistant manager.

According to Trapani and company president and chief operating officer Gino Blefari, the situation in the Los Gatos office has been stabilized and is now progressing in an "innovative, new direction."

"The office is not at all decimated," said Blefari, adding that several agents have actually returned from Alain Pinel. "We have a new manager and we're incredibly excited about him."

Unlike Chuck Nunnally, the former manager who left for Alain Pinel, Trapani will be a "noncompeting" manager, meaning he will concentrate strictly on managing the 50-plus Realtors who operate out of Los Gatos.

This will be a change for the 33-year-old Trapani, who has been honored with numerous sales awards during his 10 years with Century 21 Seville Contempo. However, Trapani said he is excited by the opportunity to use skills he developed working with clients to help other agents.

"For 10 years I've been addressing the needs of my clients," he said. "So the same passion and energy I put into that I can turn toward the office."

Blefari said Trapani's appointment has been met with an "outpouring of support" from agents of the local Century 21 offices, as well as from customers and former colleagues.

Trapani has already hired two new people, and six to eight more agents have expressed interest in joining the company. Among those are several who switched to Alain Pinel with Nunnally. Blefari said 90 percent of the agents who left his company did so in the first two days following Nunnally's departure. During that time there was a lot of confusion and misinformation floating around the office, and with Blefari out of town and the no manager in the office, many agents made "uninformed" decisions, Blefari said.

But both Blefari and Trapani emphasized that there are no hard feelings over the incident. Trapani said he considered both Nunnally and the agents who left as friends, and that the Century 21 Seville Contempo office is still referring calls to the agents who went to Alain Pinel.

Trapani takes over the second highest ranked Century 21 office in the world. Of the company's 6,300 offices worldwide, seven of the top ten in sales are local Century 21 Contempo Seville branches.

Trapani himself was named top producer of the year by the company in 1998, and named in the top 100 real estate agents in the Silicon Valley by the San Jose Business Journal. He was born in Saratoga, and his family has been in the valley for more than 100 years.

Trapani and new assistant manager Iwanaga shared a fence in their youth, and Trapani succeeded in luring Iwanaga away from a career as a professor in 1996. Iwanaga went on to win the company's "rookie of the year" award in 1998.

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