Rumor Has It: Saunders Denies Firm Was Sold

From aggressive property grabs to recruiting agents, the cutthroat world of real estate is nothing if not competitive. Apparently, spreading rumors can also be a tactic among rivals.

First reported in the magazine The Real Deal, there have been rumblings over the last few months that top-grossing Hamptons real estate firm Saunders & Associates is set to be acquired. New York City-based Compass, www.compass.com, was initially thought to have purchased it. Most recently, the reported buyer was NRT, a parent company to the Corcoran Group and Sotheby’s International Realty, both of which have a firm foothold in the Hamptons market.

However, Andrew Saunders, the firm’s president and founder, said this week that the rumors are entirely false.

“It’s completely untrue. We are not for sale, and we are not involved in discussions with anybody to sell the company,” he told The Press on Monday. Mr. Saunders maintains that the talk is a fabrication by nervous competitors who want to subvert his company because it has captured a sizable chunk of the region’s market share since it first opened in 2008. The firm reports that it exclusively represents $1.6 billion of Hamptons real estate.

A whisper campaign also can frustrate an agency’s ability to recruit brokers, and Saunders has been equally active in this area, he said. “The most effective way to undermine a recruiting effort is to say that a firm is getting sold,” the founder of Saunders explained, implying that planting such a seed can lead to a general wariness about the stability of a company.

Mr. Saunders said that a manager at a competing firm texted a Saunders agent at 3 in the morning recently to tell him that Saunders had been bought by NRT and suggested he come to work for the competing agency. A competitor is out here telling agents that we’re being acquired,” said Mr. Saunders. “It betrays [their] inability to really compete with us. They should focus less time on taking these low-road strategies to undermine us and spend more time trying to compete with us fair and square.”

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