Real Estate Powerhouse | The Local & Global Impact of Michael Saunders & Company

By Sylvia Whitman | Photos by Barbara Banks | May 2022

If you haven’t heard of Michael Saunders & Company, you probably haven’t lived here long. Its white-on-blue signs hang from swing posts on for-sale properties across Sarasota, Charlotte, Manatee, and Lee counties, especially along the waterfront. Its origin story has passed into local lore—how a native daughter and single mother borrowed $5,000 in 1976 to found her own firm and grew it into a multi-billion-dollar business that spans residential and commercial real estate, as well as new development and a multitude of support services. 

As elsewhere in the United States, real estate on the Gulf Coast has boomed during the pandemic. If you feed on quantitative data, digest these numbers: In 2021, Michael Saunders & Company generated $4.79 billion in sales volume, including a record high $161 million from the commercial division, which vaulted to the number 1 spot in Sarasota. But financial success accounts for only part of the firm’s allure. A collaborative team of loyal agents, staff, and leadership operate out of 24 branch offices. If you warm to qualitative data, browse the anonymous posts on the review site Glassdoor: “It’s all about the FEELING you get when you [are] affiliated with Michael Saunders,” wrote one employee. “Excellence, Integrity, Communication & Mutual Profitability. She expects NOTHING less than absolute professionalism out of each of us and we honor her by doing just that.”

The “she” is Michael Saunders, of the trademark colorful scarves. But you probably knew that if you’ve lived here more than a New York minute.

What’s in a Name?

Saunders’s parents named her for an Elizabethan ancestor, English poet Michael Drayton. As a child, she moved with them from Tampa to north Longboat Key, where her father opened a marina. “I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, some more successful than others,” she says. “But entrepreneurial thinking held that you could do anything you wanted in life—if you were prepared to pay the price.” 

As she grew up with sand between her toes, as she puts it, she wondered where her vocation lay. 

At Florida State University, she majored in history and psychology with a deep desire to attend law school. She knew she wanted to make a difference. “That may sound very simplistic, but I think a vision is clear, simple and the driving force of an organization. The complexity comes with the layers that you add to make that vision a reality.”

She returned to Manatee County and taught public school for a year to help earn money for law school. “It was very difficult to make a true difference in the lives of students. I had 180 each day. If a student went to sleep in class, I didn’t know whether I bored them to tears, whether they came from an abusive household, or whether they had an early morning paper route.”

Another door to making a difference opened for Michael: serving as a probation officer. With a small caseload, she visited homes, schools, and churches during dependency investigations. Saunders listened, asked questions, and forged relationships with families. But late-night trips to jail conflicted with motherhood. 

The entrepreneurial seed began to sprout. Saunders had tremendous people skills, and she thought the Gulf Coast was one the best places in the world to live. Real estate? Finding the right home—”that decision can make a huge impact on your life and your family’s life,” she says. 

As she apprenticed with brokers, she recognized the industry’s potential and shortcomings. “Standards were very different in those days. It was kind of a good old boys’ network with part-time agents.” Making a difference struck her as a full-time job. 

Saunders wanted to do things differently. “I wanted to raise the bar. I wanted a value-based company. I wanted agents to dress professionally and be professional.” As an agent herself, she knew agents needed resources and support to be successful. 

She had a vision of her own firm, selling what she knew best—no dry land, just the coast, because she understood “all the benefits and joys of living in nature, how it nourishes your soul and nourishes your spirit.” But no local bank in 1976 would lend a woman $5,000 to set up shop without a male co-signer. A customer, Siggy Levy, stepped up. When Saunders informed her broker boss, he advised her to hang onto the nameplate on her desk: She’d be back. While praising her excellent salesmanship, he told her that she was “going to be terrible at running a real-estate company.”

She made her nameplate her shingle and opened her first office on St. Armand’s Circle in 1976.

In the early days, the name “Michael” got her the phone call or the meeting, with people assuming she was a man. But the value statement proved more important than gender association. Naming the company after herself demonstrated her willingness to put her credibility on the line. Adding “& Company” acknowledged that she couldn’t undertake this venture by herself. Saunders knew she needed to surround herself with like-minded individuals who shared the same drive to make a difference. 

“I found that there were people who felt the same way in the industry, who wanted to believe in something, who wanted to have a common set of values and culture, who wanted that safety net of someone in the lead who wouldn’t stand for unethical behavior,” Saunders says. 

Saunders has always welcomed differences of opinion, just not differences of values. She anticipated, rightly, that like-minded agents and staff would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with her whatever the hurdles ahead. “I’ve never had a goal of being a large company. I just wanted to do it better every day. If you do something 1% better every day, think where you will be at the end of the year.”  

Or at the end of 46 years. 

A Son Adds Strength 

Part 2 of the origin story features Michael’s son, Drayton, who grew up with the business and, in the way of young adults, wanted nothing to do with it. Or Sarasota. After graduating from Colgate University in New York, he decamped to Santiago, Chile, where he owned a bagel and coffee shop. But in 2001, during one of Drayton’s visits home, Michael asked if he might want to join the family firm. 

He did. Two years later, Chilean business sold, 31-year-old Drayton moved back to town. He started work with Michael Saunders & Company in mortgage and title—and rotated through other divisions. 

Today he’s president, to his mother’s CEO.

Selling real estate isn’t rocket science, Drayton says, but it’s complex, and emotional on the residential side. “It’s not a transactional skill set. It is a human skill set. You talk about lifestyle; lifestyle is a proxy for your life dreams, right?” First-time home buyers, second- or third-home buyers, retirees, downsizers—for everyone, “the core of a real-estate decision is a life event,” Drayton says. “Building trust, listening to that need, providing in-depth market and neighborhood data, and being an advisor without being the decider—that’s what a good agent does.”

Drayton has experienced the mercurial extremes of real estate, first the recession of 2007 and lately the COVID-era spike. Being prepared to face every challenge and opportunity is the hallmark of a strong and sustainable real estate company, Drayton observes. Real estate is always local, “one of those trite sayings, but one that is really true.” 

Today’s strong market has accelerated shifts underway before the pandemic. The old assumption that most out-of-state buyers drove down from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast crumbled as more flights landed at SRQ. As the coronavirus hit cities hard and remote work untethered workers from the office, Sarasota’s appeal broadened. “You began to see in the last two years far more in-migration from the Northeast in particular,” Drayton says. At the same time, the region is luring house hunters priced out of places like California, New York, and even some markets within Florida, such as Naples. 

The global market is also readjusting. Pre-internet, an international traveler might return home to Sweden, England, or France after a vacation and talk up Sarasota’s beaches, culture, and laid-back atmosphere within a small circle of friends. Technology has transformed word-of-mouth marketing. 

“As we’ve grown as a company,” Drayton says, “we’ve layered into that networking with an international audience. We are connected to affiliate companies nationally and internationally because it really is a global market.” 

The pandemic interrupted travel, however. International buyers are just now returning. Michael Saunders & Company stays connected both online and offline with network partners of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, Luxury Portfolio International, and Mayfair International—extending the company’s reach nationally and internationally. Drayton notes, “Having access to these premier brokers who have strong footholds and commanding market-share in their respective markets is important to our agents and customers alike.”  

The company is expanding robustly into new home development and commercial real estate. Here again, Michael Saunders & Company makes the most of its long and deep ties to the area. Both developers and businesspeople “don’t want to come in and just do one thing; they’re committing to the overall Gulf Coast market area” in establishing new businesses and developments. Growth and expansion are part of Michael Saunders & Company’s strategic plan for the future. 

Making a Difference Writ Large

In addition to selling the Gulf Coast, Michael Saunders & Company is vested in it. “Michael and I have been very passionate about being involved in things that we feel drive our brand as a region,” Drayton says. He points to Michael’s involvement with Mote Marine, Selby Gardens, West Coast Black Theatre Troupe, and The Education Foundation of Sarasota County, and his with The Bay, the Van Wezel Foundation, and the new performing arts hall aborning, among other nonprofits. 

The MSC Foundation, founded in 2011, engages the company’s agents, staff, and leadership team to give back to the communities that have brought the company so much success over its 46 years. Last year it hit its goal of raising $1 million. Agents and staff fund and run the MSC Foundation (Michael and Drayton match contributions). With two grant cycles a year, the MSC Foundation has given grants to 241 local organizations in Manatee, Sarasota and Charlotte counties that provide “shelter, sustenance, education, and a path to self-sufficiency.”

The company also recognizes that what makes this region such a great place to live and work brings with it the infrastructure challenges of newcomers—more traffic, for instance, and rising housing costs that strap younger and lower-income workers. Although Michael Saunders & Company first established its niche with waterfront, aka luxury properties, Michael notes that agents now sell at all price points. Solving the affordable housing crisis requires a public-private partnership, she believes, and creative solutions facilitated by nonprofit, government, and business leaders.

Michael and Drayton agree that the company draws its strength from trustful relationships—agents with clients, company with agents, community with company. “We not only want to make the company better; we want to make the community better,” Michael says. 

With a succession plan well in place, Michael Saunders could consider less work and more play. She has full confidence in Drayton and her leadership team. “It’s not as much about me anymore but rather ensuring that the legacy of making a difference endures.” Drayton has even supplied playmates, two grandchildren whom she adores. Michael concedes that she wouldn’t mind more play time with them, and more travel and fly fishing. “But I never have been able to stop and start a day and say, Okay, this is work time and this is Michael time,” she says. “It all kind of blends together.”

Michael Saunders still feels the call of business and community involvement. “You can’t retire from passion,” she says.