Oceanside's Stonegate Real Estate seeks to give new agents a shot

There’s a new real estate player in town.

Fresh on the Oceanside business scene this April, Stonegate Real Estate is the brainchild of boyhood friends — licensed real estate broker Anthony Ponte and licensed Realtor Nicholas Battaglia — who in addition to starting their business here, have also put family roots down in the hamlet.

“Nick and I talked one day, he said he wanted to get his [Realtor] license, he got it, and it snowballed from there,” Ponte said. “It rolled into Stonegate.”

Ponte, who said he has roughly ten years of experience in the business, has worked in markets on Long Island, Brooklyn and Manhattan, helping to buy and sell “everything from huge markets to little boutique shops,” he added.

In addition to providing professional real estate sales and buyer services for clients, Ponte said he wants to make Stonegate a place where new real estate professionals can get their feet wet in an encouraging environment.

“I see a lot of discouragement in a lot of new agents,” Ponte said, resulting in what he noticed to be high turnover in the industry. “When you first come into the business, and you’re very new, it’s hard to get listings, it’s hard to represent a seller,” he explained.

But through weekly training sessions and in-the-field mentoring by seasoned agents, he said he hopes to change that. “We want it so there will always be business surrounding them,” he said.

In addition to providing learning opportunities for new agents, Ponte said Stonegate staff attend a number of business networking events to stay in tune with the industry.

All of it is part of a philosophy Ponte said he wants at Stonegate, where “we leave no stone unturned.”