Michael Graves is a broker at Douglas Elliman, the residential real estate brokerage. He is the leader of the Michael Graves Team, at the firm, which he joined in 2013 from Chelsea-based boutique brokerage Core Group Marketing. He closed Elliman's highest-priced transaction of 2014, and as of March 2015 he was included in The Real Deal's Top 75 New York City Agents list. Graves grew up in St. Cloud, Minnesota, a town outside Minneapolis, in a Catholic and musical household. He became a broker in 2009, when he joined Core. While at Core, Graves brokered more than $150 million in deals over three years. Graves has appeared on HGTV reality television series "Selling New York." He left New York, where he was studying music, in the early 2000s to work for his family's luxury hotel development company, Graves Hospitality, as sales and marketing director. He has a master's in composition, theory and film scoring from New York University and has received the American Music Center's CAP Award, NYU's Honor Scholar Award and the Founder's Day Award. Graves also studied at Mannes College of Music. He went into real estate because he found he could not support his wife and twins, born in 2010, in New York City working as a classical guitarist and composer. In 2012, his father, the hotel developer Jim Graves, ran against Michele Bachmann for her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and lost. Michael Graves' wife is a concert violinist. As of 2012, the family lived in Williamsburg.