Re/Max Palos Verdes Belle of the Bay Sandra Sanders
Re/Max Estate Properties founder Sandra Sanders. Photo by David Fairchild (DavidFairchildStudio.com)
Belle of the Bay
The old boys’ club was no problem for Southern born Sandra Sanders
Sandra Sanders opened Re/Max Palos Verdes in a medical building at Palos Verdes Drive North, and Crenshaw Boulevard in 1984. Re/Max (Real Estate Maximums) was a franchise founded a decade earlier by Denver-based Dave Liniger and his future wife Gail Main.
Prior to Re/Max, real estate offices split sales commissions 60-40, with the 60 percent going to the agent. The broker provided agents with an office, logistical support and marketing.
Re/Max upended this business model by introducing “rent-a-desks.” Instead of closely split commissions, agents pay brokers a flat fee, plus a small percent of their commissions. In return, brokers give agents a desk and logistical support. Re/Max predated today’s shared offices by half a century.
The rent-a desk model attracted top producing agents, leaving conventionally structured offices with the less productive agents. Re/Max brokers were discouraged from keeping low producers because their franchise fee was based on the number of agents they had.
“Everyone has to contribute. If an agent isn’t selling, I bring them in and tell them, ‘You’ve got to sell,’” Sanders said in explaining how the system works.
Sandra Sanders with other top Peninsula real estate brokers Steve Watts, Raju Chhabria, and Chris Adlam in 2010. Photo by David Fairchild
Within five years Sanders had over 40 agents, and had opened a second office in Malaga Cove.
Then, in 1989, longtime Peninsula broker Ron Florence sold his Carriage Realty to Coldwell Banker, a national, split-commission brokerage. Over 70 agents promptly left Coldwell Banker and joined Re/Max Palos Verdes.
“Agents were loyal to Ron, but they weren’t loyal to Coldwell because it was from out of the area. And Carriage’s office was right across from ours, in Malaga Cove. So, I got lucky. But you have to be somewhat good to be lucky,” Sanders said.
Two years prior to Sanders opening Re/Max Palos Verdes, Bob Todd converted his Spring Realty offices in the younger demographic, hyperactive Beach Cities to Re/Max. Todd’s Re/Max Beach Cities enjoyed even faster growth than Re/Max Palos Verdes. By the time Todd retired in 2005, he owned 14 Re/Max offices with over 700 agents in the Beach Cities and West Los Angeles.
Todd’s rival in the Beach Cities was Shorewood Realtors, a conventional commission broker, founded in 1969 by Arnold Goldstein and Larry Wolf. To stem the exodus of their agents to Todd’s Re/Max, Goldstein and Wolf adopted the rent-a-desk model. The two companies battled for dominance in the Beach Cities for the next three decades, until the Great Recession of 2008.
During their expansion years, both Re/Max Beach Cities and Shorewood attempted to expand to the Peninsula, without success.
“You’re looking at her,” Sanders said by way of explaining why they failed. Todd’s Malaga Cove office was one of nearly a dozen offices she bought in her consolidation of the Peninsula market.
When the Great Recession hit and home prices plummeted, Sanders closed her San Pedro office and put her own money into her company to keep it afloat. But her chief rivals fared worse, providing her another lucky opportunity.
In 2010, Todd’s daughter Kelly Amundson, who took over Re/Max Beach Cities after Todd’s conviction on loan fraud cost him his real estate license, called Sanders’ son James.
“Kelly told James she was filing for bankruptcy and even though we were competitors, she wanted what was best for her agents and thought we would be a good fit. So, for just $200,000, we acquired their 200 agents and their offices in the Beach Cities and West Los Angeles,” Sander said.
The sale left Shorewood as Sanders’ biggest rival. Like Sanders, Shorewood founders Goldstein and Wolf were approaching 80. Unlike Sanders, they were ready to retire. In 2014, they sold Shorewood, with its nine offices, and 250 agents, to Denver-based real estate mogul Roger Herman. Two years later, Shorewood was dissolved during Herman’s bankruptcy and its assets acquired by Vista Sotheby’s.
Peninsula brokers Adlam and Associates, and the Edler Group, and Realtors Gerard Bisignano and Darin DeRenzis formed Vista Sotheby’s in 2007. In 2015, they established a Beach Cities beachhead by merging with South Bay Brokers, which, like Re/Max Beach Cities and Re/Max Palos Verdes, was formed in the mid 1980s by Jim Van Zanten and Jack Gillespie.
The Shorewood and South Bay Brokers transactions made Vista Sotheby’s the second largest Peninsula real estate broker and the third largest in the South Bay, behind Keller Williams and Sanders’ Re/Max.
Sanders said she chose not to bid on Shorewood because she thought she could win over a significant number of Shorewood agents without paying for the company’s assets.
“And we did. 75 to 80 Shorewood agents joined us,” she said.
In 2012, as the Great Recession receded and South Bay home prices rebounded, Sanders rebranded Re/Max Palos Verdes as Re/Max Estate Properties and ditched the cheesy, red, white and blue Re/Max business cards in favor of black cards with the Re/Max balloon embossed in silver, to reflect her increasingly wealthy market.
Last year, Re/Max Estate Properties accounted for over 40 percent of the Peninsula’s 1,280 home sales and over 30 percent of the South Bay’s 7,896 homes sales.
Sanders’ 17 offices, 725 agent and more than $5 billion in annual sales have surpassed Todd’s levels during the pre Great Recession South Bay real estate boom years.
Sanders explains her success to new agents by telling them about the first time she went fly fishing.
“My husband and I went to a lodge in Montana, and I caught 21 fish the first day. Back at the lodge the other guests were complaining about not catching any fish. So the next day, I studied why I was catching fish and others weren’t. The first reason was I had a good guide. He went up and down the river looking for the best holes to cast in while the other guides settled in one place.The second reason was I cast left and right. I worked really hard.
“A good coach and a good work ethic is all you need.”
Sanders’ coach, she said, was the legendary motivational speaker Jim Rohn.
“I listened to his tapes and what I learned was ‘Work harder on yourself than on your business.’”
Nothing in Sanders upbringing portended her becoming the most successful real estate broker in one of the nation’s wealthiest, most competitive real estate markets.
Beginning with the fact that she is a woman in a field long dominated by men.
Sanders acknowledged having had her “me too” moments, but insists they never hindered her career.
“There was an old boys’ club that I was not included in,” Sanders said. “I can’t say it hurt me, but I certainly noticed that I wasn’t included.”
“When I started, Re/Max had almost no female brokers. And most of them were partners with their husbands. It’s still that way,” she said.
“But I was never motivated to break through the glass ceiling. I was motivated to do the best job I could every day of the week,” she said.
“My advice to women is the same I give to men. Color, creed and gender don’t matter. It’s what’s inside you.”
Sandra McConnell grew up an only child in Minden, a town of 8,000 in the northeast corner of Louisiana, near Shreveport and the Red River. It bequeathed her a disarming Southern accent, a supportive husband and not much else.
Her father, an oil field supervisor, died when she was nine, leaving her to care for her English-born, epileptic mother Fairy Maurice Barnes McConnell.
“I had no ambition. I just wanted to be get married and be a housewife. When it was time to go to college, my mother told me I could be a teacher, a nurse or a secretary. She was a teacher and hated it and I didn’t want to be a nurse, so I studied business at Louisiana Tech University.”
At 22, she married Glover Sanders, her highschool sweetheart, who possessed an engineering degree from Texas A&M.
“Part of the reason I married Glover was he agreed to have my mother live with us. He must have really loved me because mother was crazy as well as epileptic,” Sanders said.
When Glover was offered a job at Union Carbide in Torrance, the couple, with young children John and Diane and her mother moved to a small home on Spring Creek Road in Rancho Palos Verdes.
After their third child James entered St. John Fisher in 1973, Grover suggested to his wife that she apply her formidable energy to selling real estate.
“I was bored and just wanted to make some extra money. But, being competitive, I wanted to do well. After eight months, I had six homes in escrow, so it became a career.”
She started with the Rockoff brothers’ Robert’s Realty and over the next 10 years worked for a half dozen other Peninsula brokers before starting Re/Max Palos Verdes.
She said affiliated with Re/Max because she thought its commission structure would enable her to attract the Peninsula’s top Realtors.
In recent years, Sanders has relinquished responsibilities to her sons John and James and daughter Diane. She’s dialed back her 24/7 days to 10 to 4, Monday through Friday, leaving her time to swim in her pool at her ranch style Rolling Hills home.
As her fortune grew Sanders became one of the Peninsula’s principal philanthropist. She served on the Norris Theater Board of Director for a dozen years and has also contributed to the Palos Verdes Art Center, Marymount College, St. John Fisher, Rainbow Services and Torrance Memorial Medical Center. In 2013, The Palos Verdes Chamber of Commerce named her Woman of the Year and last month she received the Norris Theater Key to Our Heart award.
At 82, Sanders credits her energy to a positive attitude, exercise and moderation.
“I take life as it comes. I think stress ages people,” she said with her understated Southern sensibility.