As Floridians go, Dean Saunders is definitely an outlier. According to Census Bureau figures, Florida is the second-most transient state in the nation. Saunders, on the other hand, is not just a homegrown Florida boy. He’s eighth-generation. So when this true-blue Floridian looks around at the sand and surf that he’s known all his life, he sees more than just tourist attractions and opportunity zones. He sees home. Although change is inevitable in a state that welcomes more than 1,000 newcomers every day, Saunders isn’t about to let his Florida slip away.

Eighth-Generation Floridian

For 40 years, the eighth-generation Floridian has endeavored to preserve choice swaths of Old Florida, first through the political process and, since 1996, as the founder of the Lakeland-based real estate brokerage firm SVN | Saunders Ralston Dantzler Real Estate. In both roles, Saunders has worked extensively with conservation easements, a process that enables private landowners to maintain specific property rights while protecting their land from commercial development. He began considering their need long before he even knew the term conservation easement existed. “When I was growing up in Clermont, you couldn’t go anywhere in Central Florida during spring without the air being permeated with the scent of orange blossoms,” Saunders says.

“That sense of place is very important, but over the years, our place changed. It no longer had that sweet aroma in the springtime. It no longer had all those beautiful, rolling green hills. “I was 24 years old, driving home with my wife, and I looked around and said, ‘This will all be houses one day.’ And that’s when I started wondering if there was a way to pay landowners to keep it agricul- tural. To preserve it. To not develop it. At 24, I had no concept of how that could happen.” Nor did he have any inkling of the pivotal role he would play in promoting the preservation of his home state. A natural salesman, Saunders recalls winning a Rotary Club contest as a kid. In a town of a few thousand, the 8-year-old sold 150 tickets to a pancake breakfast and took home a black-and-white TV.

A Natural Salesman

His outgoing persona made him a natural in politics, which Saunders describes as “just another form of sales, but one where you’re selling ideas.”

In the late 1980s, he worked as an agricultural liaison for Senator Lawton Chiles, who subsequently became Governor Chiles. Saunders ran for office himself and was twice elected to the Florida House of Representatives. He served from 1992 to 1996. It was during his tenure in the House that Saunders began trying to sell landowners and politicians on the concept of conservation easements. It proved to be considerably more difficult than hawking tickets to a pancake breakfast.

“I decided to make this crazy idea a reality,” Saunders says. “I had long felt that the environmental community and the landowners — farmers and ranchers — had a lot more in common than they realized. It’s just that they didn’t speak the same language. They couldn’t really talk to each other. I told them that this was a way to protect the integrity of property rights but still conserve the parts of Florida that we all love.

“Well, the government guys looked at me like I was a fascist. They were like, ‘You’re crazy. We’re going to pay people not to develop their land?’ They thought the government could only protect land that the government owned. And the landowners looked at me like I was a communist. ‘Are you kidding me? The government is going to come in here and I’m going to have to be partners with them?’ A lot of people on both sides weren’t sure about it at all,” he says.

Founding the Green Swamp Land Authority

Saunders ultimately drafted the 1994 bill that established the Green Swamp Land Authority, the first state entity authorized to purchase development rights from private landowners through conservation easements. The Green Swamp region consists of nearly 323,000 acres between Orlando and Tampa, including the headwaters of four rivers that flow to the Gulf of Mexico.

“Conservation easements are really mainstream now, but at that time, it wasn’t easy to do,” Saunders says. “But once we proved that the concept could be successful, we were able to encourage other state agencies to protect land through easements without having to own it and manage it,” he says. Although Saunders says he loved public service, politics was not his ultimate ambition.

Shifting to the Private Sector

At the conclusion of his second term, he founded Saunders Real Estate in 1996. He subsequently teamed with Gary Ralston and Todd Dantzler to form a separate commercial real estate firm and then merged the two companies under the SVN | Saunders Ralston Dantzler Real Estate banner. When he launched his company in 1996, he initially envisioned operating as a traditional brokerage. That changed after he received a call from a rancher who wanted to learn more about conservation easements.

“He said he thought it was crazy at first, but after a while, he began to think it might be something that could help him,” Saunders says. “So he wanted to hire me to get one done for his ranch. I had never thought about doing that but suddenly realized there might be other landowners who needed this kind of help. That launched me into this different world where I was working with a lot of land-owners on conservation easements, and I made it a principal part of my practice.”

Land Report Deal of the Year

Saunders estimates that he has worked on more than 120 conservation easements, resulting in the protection of more than 270,000 acres. In addition, he’s been involved in several of the most notable sales involving ecologically sensitive Florida lands. One of the most notable was the $562 million purchase of 382,000 acres of timberland in the Florida Panhandle by AgReserves Inc. from The St. Joe Company, which was subsequently honored as the 2014 Land Report Timberland Deal of the Year.

For the next five years, Saunders masterminded the sale of a strategic portion of that very same tract to the State of Florida. Known as the Bluffs of Saint Teresa, the 17,080 acres include miles of frontage along the Gulf of Mexico, Ochlockonee Bay, and the Ochlockonee River. Saunders considered the Bluffs “an absolute gem,” and so did the State of Florida and its partners, including the Department of Defense and The Nature Conservancy.

The $43 million transaction was honored as the 2020 Land Report Deal of the Year. “Dean serves a niche that most people can’t touch with the effectiveness that he has,” says Richard Dempsey, a colleague at SVN who has worked with Saunders since 2000. “Over the years, we’ve had several different governors in Florida, and each has had a different perspective on the issue of conservation easements. Yet Dean has been able to successfully navigate all those changes.” And while easements aren’t neces-sarily easy to do or profitable, Saunders takes pride in knowing that he has been able to help preserve a hint of the Old Florida he remembers from his childhood. “Looking back, it’s pretty remarkable that we got it done at all,” Saunders says. “But the impacts have been significant.”

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Published in The Land Report Summer 2024.