Founded in 1920
Edgar and Estelle Berger founded Berger Realty in 1920. As the business grew, they hired an employee to help. The Bergers saw something special in a young veteran, fresh from military service and looking to start his working career.
He learned the ropes quickly and took on more and more responsibilities as his experience grew. His natural leadership abilities and organizational skills made him a terrific manager, a trusted member of the business community and a real asset to the organization.
That bright young man was Leon Grisbaum, who took ownership of the company when the Bergers retired. He has been here ever since–building a track record of excellence over 75 years in the making. His energy and passion for innovation never faded. He took the company from a small one-man office to Ocean City, New Jersey’s busiest rental agency. An instrument-rated pilot, Leon has even been known to use his twin-engine plane to deliver documents to surprised clients, hundreds of mile away in New York and Pennsylvania. That’s a graphic example of Leon’s commitment to customer service.
Like the Bergers before him, Leon leads by example, setting the tone and instilling core values of decency, fair dealing and doing the right thing through the very fabric of the organization.
Today’s Berger has four offices, 100 full-time agents, 20 support employees, an in-house photographer, an attorney and a business manager who has been with the company since 1971. Many Berger associates have been here over 30 years. It’s a tribute to the loyalty Leon inspires.
Throughout our history, Berger Realty has always embraced change and expanded infrastructure to meet demand. We were among the first on the island to establish a department dedicated to summer rentals. It’s been so successful that Berger does more than twice the volume of rentals as Ocean City’s second and third largest agencies, combined.
Information is everything in real estate and Berger remains a technology leader, with digital document processing and an advanced internal network to keep agents in continuous contact with one another and their clients. In our state-of-the-art multimedia room, agents get the training they need to stay current on all the issues affecting real estate, like law, financing, taxes, insurance, the environment and technology.
These days, it’s unusual to find a real estate agency operating for seven decades under one owner. Berger is not a chain or conglomerate, controlled from miles away. We’ve grown by leaps and bounds, but at heart, we remain the friendly and hard-working family business Mr. and Mrs. Berger envisioned–never straying far from those humble roots.