Two hours cruising Sag Harbor Bay on a sunny August afternoon has an intoxicating effect. Thinking gets bigger, dreamier.
“I would like for Margit to be the No. 1 agent in the world,” Blair Brandt said.
For most, this would be magical thinking, but Blair is plain about his ambitions for his wife, Margit Brandt. From her perch on the deck, she nods in agreement with Blair, calculating how many $20 million homes she would need to sell in a year to take the crown.
“It’s possible,” they both conclude.
In the span of a decade, Margit, 37, has ascended from fledgling agent to one of the top brokers in America’s biggest trophy market: Palm Beach.
Since joining her current brokerage, Premier Estate Properties, in 2022, she has closed more than $1 billion in sales, including $350 million so far this year, and is preparing to open her own Serena & Lilly-designed office on Palm Beach’s Bankers Row. She placed fifth in The Real Deal’s 2024 Palm Beach County broker ranking with $319.3 million in on-market sales. She represented Australian billionaire Michael Dorrell in his $150 million purchase of Tarpon Island, a private island in Palm Beach and Florida’s most expensive home sale in 2024.
After the private island, she brought the buyer to the $42.5 million mansion at 101 Jungle Road and landed the listing for a trophy estate at 1140 South Ocean Boulevard in Manalapan. She represented WeatherTech founder David MacNeil when he bought it for $55.5 million in May. She declined to comment on her clients for this story.
“She really is a shark under cover,” Miss Florida USA Lou Schieffelin, Margit’s showing assistant, said.
Margit and Blair are part of a fresh generation of Palm Beachers bringing down the average age of an island long joked of as “God’s waiting room,” and raising their young families there. They are also fixtures in the Winter White House scene. President Donald Trump is a client; the Brandts are GOP boosters and Mar-a-Lago members. She had the rental listing for 1125 South Ocean Boulevard in 2023, when the president was asking $195,000 per month for the oceanfront mansion. She doesn’t comment on her relationship with the president aside to confirm that yes, she is the dealmaker-in-chief’s dealmaker.
Their dynamic is that of starlet and manager — she performs, he sets the stage.
A native New Yorker who married into Palm Beach, she has a keen understanding that her lifestyle is the aspiration she sells to other recent arrivals. In a new era for Palm Beach, with new money, new people and new energy, Margit, immersed in this zeitgeist, has disrupted the old guard in a place where the same circle of agents have held the keys to the kingdom for decades.
“She just knows all the right people,” Daniel Heider, a top agent with TTR Sotheby’s International Realty and Margit’s referral partner in Washington, D.C., said. Should a client need an 8 p.m. reservation at Le Bilboquet in the height of season — she knows whom to call. “There’s a regular line, a VIP line and V-V-VIP line, which Margit has.”
That doesn’t mean she’s been readily welcomed into the inner circle. It’s a market where agents have generational roots.
“Her mother wasn’t a real estate agent in Palm Beach for generations,” Heider said. “There are agents down there who are into the art world and relatives of Lilly Pulitzer.”
It’s always been catty and competitive among Palm Beach agents, and Margit openly jokes about her “haters.” But none would register their disdain on the record.
“How much did they have to pay for that?” was the common snark in response to requests for comment for this profile.
The duo
It is difficult to picture any nasty business as I decamp from a crowded Thursday morning jitney onto Sag Harbor’s Main Street. At the village docks I find Rivalry, a Daychaser 48 with darkly stained woodwork and navy upholstered seating.
Margit and Blair are in their element, sipping sparkling waters and pointing out friends’ boats docked at the Sag Harbor Yacht Club. She is tall, slim, deeply tanned, with highlighted hair and, per usual, wearing a sundress. Blair wears an Amber Waves trucker hat — Hamptons in-crowd merch.
He is both her husband and her chief brand officer. They can appear of the same mind at times, practically finishing each other’s sentences. As a couple, they are uncommonly in sync.
The sun shining overheard, Rivalry cuts west through the glittering water as the pair rattles off the owners of the waterfront estates as they pass by: “He founded Blade.” “That’s Jimmy Buffett’s place.” “They host great parties.” “That’s Jeff Greene’s — it’s 55 acres.”
This is how their day would go in Palm Beach in season, the Brandts cruising with clients to listings, reciting from memory the owners, architects and price per square foot of every home along the Intracoastal Waterway. Their lives follow the migratory pattern of America’s East Coast affluent: They live in Palm Beach full-time but fly north for July and August, when it is too hot for people to buy houses in Palm Beach.
They rent in East Hampton and hatch a strategy for the upcoming busy period. Blair takes charge of marketing efforts and backend organization; Margit is the dealmaker.
“She’s the product,” he said. “She deals with the clients, she does the house tours, she does the real estate transactions.”
Their dynamic is that of starlet and manager — she performs, he sets the stage — or TV news anchor and trusted producer.
“If you’re watching Sean Hannity,” Blair said. “He’s the one that’s there, but there’s 20 people behind the camera.”
Made in New York
A fresh-faced, non-blonded Margit smiles into the camera.
“When you’re dealing with high-end clients, you have to do whatever it takes to sell,” she says.
It is the opening line of her intro on “Next Step Realty: NYC,” a 2015 ABC Family reality show fated to a one-season run.
Margit, who is from New York, was barely two years into her real estate career at the time.
“I went to New York City public school and somehow made it to Palm Beach,” she said, her tone conveying pleasantly surprised disbelief.
She was born on the Upper East Side. Her father had grown up in Throggs Neck in the Bronx, earned an MBA at Wharton and went into accounting with Arthur Young and Company, a precursor to Ernst & Young, according to his obituary. They lived on East 79th and York, and she went to grade school at P.S. 158, spending time in Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum.
Later, the family moved to Westchester, and Margit had a suburban adolescence of afterschool sports and lifeguarding gigs. Unlike her Palm Beach-raised children, she did not play racquet sports or golf, nor did she use seasons as verbs.
“How much did they have to pay for that?”
Her grandmother was a real estate agent in Westchester, but she had no early inclination toward real estate. She was always finding ways to make money, though. At 9 years old, she convinced a neighbor she was a qualified dog sitter.
“I somehow made $3,000 that summer watching this French lady’s dogs,” she recalled, laughing. It was her first big payday.
After graduating from UNC Wilmington in 2010, she headed to San Diego, thinking a career in public relations would be fun and glamorous. But the celebrities and earning potential underwhelmed her, and she returned home to New York City.
She thought she’d give real estate a try. She got licensed, landing her first gig as an assistant with the Corcoran Group, before a friend recommended she interview with Next Step Realty. There she met Blair, who co-founded the firm.
Blair is a Palm Beach kid. He grew up on the island, and went to Palm Beach Day School before being shipped off to Deerfield Academy. His great-grandfather founded a New York City movie theater dynasty. The Brandt brothers, Bernard, Louis, William and Harry, founded a namesake chain in 1930 and grew it to 150 locations. Among those was a prime stretch of movie theaters on West 42nd Street in Times Square: the Selwyn, Apollo, Times Square, Lyric, Victory, Empire and Liberty. They suffered in the blight of the 1970s and 1980s, and in 1989 the Durst Organization bought them for $3 million, the New York Daily News reported at the time.
(“Never sell,” Margit says on the boat as we glide past Shelter Island. She currently has the $24 million listing for Douglas Durst’s Palm Beach estate.)
As Blair puts it, his family made money but no one figured out how to “make it stick.” He knew he had to make his own way when he graduated from the University of Richmond in 2010. He had interned for Christian Angle, who has long been one of Palm Beach’s top agents, and after seeing college friends struggle to find apartments in New York, he got the idea for Next Step.
It focuses on tenant representation for affluent college graduates and early-career professionals — 20-somethings with their parents’ money. He interviewed Margit in February of 2014.
“I think our interview lasted like three hours,” said Blair.
Margit hopped to Next Step and the pair started dating, a fact that was featured prominently in the 10 episodes of the show. She quickly emerged as the firm’s top agent and started working on corporate relocations in addition to helping her post-grad clients.
“I look back and it was almost the best practice I could have had,” Margit said. She was too young to be taken seriously by the clientele she serves today, but she could cut her teeth finding their children apartments. She refers to her time at Next Step as a “bootcamp” in learning how to work for the ultra wealthy.
“Often the real clients were the parents. The kids were there, but they weren’t writing all the checks themselves or choosing the place themselves,” Blair said. “She’d have guarantors who were making $25 million a year.”
Margit and Blair got married. Things were going well in New York, but Margit wasn’t interested in raising a family on the Upper East Side.
“She was kind of at a fork in the road with her real estate business,” Blair said. “I basically just pulled the trigger, shepherded us down here and said, ‘We’re going to live here and you’re going to launch your real estate business here.’”
Margit, for her part, said, “I was an easy sell.”
Rising with the tides
When they arrived, she was 28 and a new mom. She got to work studying the territory.
“I would ride my bike up and down each street, memorizing the names,” Margit said, remembering the sweltering heat.
She got her Florida license in 2019 and hung it with Brown Harris Stevens, but business was slow.
“I heard a lot of no’s,” she said. She had her real estate chops but wasn’t a tested Palm Beach agent. Still, she made progress as a buyer’s rep. When the pandemic triggered a massive wealth migration to the island, she found her deal flow.
In April of 2021, she represented buyers Joseph Taylor and Hilary Budny in their purchase of the Todd Glaser-developed spec home at 259 Pendleton Avenue for $17.5 million. Three months later, she represented them again when they sold it for $18.4 million. That same year, she represented Boston multifamily developer Bruce Percelay in his $4.5 million purchase of the lot at 261 Nightingale Trail. In 2022, she had the listing when he sold the completed spec home for $16 million.
Shattering price records became the norm. Savvy buyers doubled their money in six-month flips. Deals begot more, bigger deals. It was a good time to be selling South Florida.
“Both her and my ascension are certainly also tied to our marketplaces seeing pricepoints like they’ve never seen before,” Dina Goldentayer, Douglas Elliman’s No. 1 individual agent and a savant of Miami Beach home sales, said. She’s also a friend of Margit’s.
“And it doesn’t hurt that she got a $150 million sale under her belt,” Goldentayer added, referring to the Dorrell deal on Tarpon Island. “It’s only going one way after that, and it’s up. Big sales lead to more big sales.”
Bringing the buyer for Tarpon did open new doors.
In Palm Beach, where people follow local real estate the way small towns in Texas follow high school football, locals started looking at her as a star prospect. Tony Beyer, a client and head of investment firm Poinciana Capital Partners, tapped her to list his house after tracking her career for years.
“I admire people’s success, and she did it on her own. She wasn’t carving off members from this club or that club,” he said. “It was hard work.”
As Rivalry cruises past the megayachts of friends and acquaintances, Margit is enjoying the fruits of her labor.
But the captain is steering us back toward land, where grandiose dreams concocted at sea hit pavement. Summer is waning, and Palm Beach’s busy season is approaching. There is much talk that the election of Zohran Mamdani to the New York City mayorship will spur another wave of wealth migration to the island, and Margit has already gotten calls from nervous Manhattanites. She expects a busy season ahead.
“I can’t wait to get back,” she said.