- February 16, 2026
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A call Kelly Gilliland received one day from Schroeder-Manatee Ranch in 1995 could have been quite the blow to her ego.
The young professional had then been out of college for two years. She had a degree in economics and international relations from Florida State, and a year of experience working at a local bank. And the human resources team at SMR, which then was so early in the development of Lakewood Ranch only the first houses had been built, had a question for Gilliland: We realize you are way overqualified for this, the HR manager told her, but would you be willing to take a job as a receptionist for us?
Turns out Gilliland had applied for a job at SMR in real estate a year earlier, but there were no openings. Yet she left such a good impression, the leadership team wanted her to be the person who answered the phone calls and greeted people at the front door. Gilliland took the job — with no ego bruise. “I thought it would be a good opportunity to make some good contacts,” she says, noting not many people in her network in Sarasota, where she grew up, had a clue where Lakewood Ranch was or what it could or would become.
Gilliland took the role, and soon earned several promotions. She ultimately was an executive assistant for the company’s current CEO, Rex Jensen, before he was in the role, and worked closely, too, with John Swart, a top commercial real estate executive with SMR. While she hasn’t worked for SMR in 25 years, Gilliland remains both a champion of the community — serving on multiple boards and volunteering for organizations — and a key person in making it a great place to live. (She would know: she’s lived in the same home in Summerfield since 2000, where she raised her two sons, who are now in college.)
Gilliland’s volunteer efforts to make Lakewood Ranch a better place culminated late last year, when she received the Don O’Leary Lifetime Achievement Award at the Lakewood Ranch Community Activities 25th Anniversary Appreciation Awards. “From helping shape Market Street and Corporate Park to her continued civic involvement today, Kelly embodies the spirit that makes Lakewood Ranch thrive,” the LWRCA team posted on social media the night of the event.
LWRCA President and CEO Keith Pandeloglou quipped at the event when introducing Gilliland that her email signature, of all the places she’s volunteered or served with, should be seven lines deep. “The longevity, and breadth and diversity, of her involvement is impressive,” he says in an interview.
Pandeloglou notes how Gilliland, 54, balanced some of her volunteer efforts, like the labor-intensive time on the Lakewood Ranch Community Foundation grants committee, with being a single mom and running her own business. “Even when it was maybe not easy or convenient to volunteer, she made it a priority,” he says.
Gilliland was born in Wilmington, Delaware; her family moved to the Sarasota area when she was a baby.
She initially thought she would study chemistry at Florida State and maybe become a pharmacist. “But I really enjoyed my economics classes and decided to do something in finance,” she says.
That field was closer to what her father, who founded Horizon Mortgage Corp. in Sarasota in 1979, was doing. But she wanted to work on her own after college. Her first stop: a local bank. “I got a job as a teller,” she says. “But in the first year we were robbed and then bought by a bigger bank. So I thought, ‘I’m done with this.’”
Next was SMR. She gained some important experience in dealmaking and navigating the complex development process while there, she says, and left as commercial sales manager. In that role she helped broker land deals to developers who built the Market Street Publix and several buildings in the corporate park, among other projects.
Much as she loved living, working and — later when her sons were born — playing in Lakewood Ranch, the work at SMR led Gilliland to want to chase her own thing.
While mulling over her options, her father, running a mortgage firm amid a surge in the real estate market, made her a job offer, too. Gilliland debated the offer — she was home for the holidays at the end of 1999, rehabbing after foot surgery — with the knowledge she and her dad “had butted heads somewhat growing up.”
Like she did with SMR, Gilliland took the job and made it her own. She recalls her dad was a transactional broker, while she was more of a relationship broker. “I knew when I went in, I had to be myself,” she says. “I had to be me and not him. I knew if I was going to do this long-term I would have to have my own clients, my own book.”
Over the next two decades, Gilliland helped grow Horizon Mortgage into one of the largest residential lenders in the Sarasota-Manatee region. In 2021, Gilliland launched her own company: Integrity Mortgage Capital. It’s a boutique firm, where, she says, it handles everything from a garage condo for one client to a $50 million construction loan for a developer. “I never really specialize in one thing,” she says. “I finance everything and anything commercial.”
Gilliland is motivated mostly by two factors to give back in the ways she does.
One is her mom, Linda Williams. On some Saturdays growing up, Williams took Gilliland and her sister to Clothes Closet, a nonprofit in Sarasota with slightly used clothes and toys for children in need. “We’d go with her and help straighten the shelves and organize the store,” Gilliland writes in the questionnaire form for the LWRCA award. “It taught me what giving back looked like and meant.”
A second reason is paying it forward for all the help Gilliland received from her community in Lakewood Ranch through raising her two children. “When my boys were pretty young, I became a single mom and it wasn’t easy,” she writes in the questionnaire. From teachers and other parents to neighbors and coaches, Gilliland says the community “supported me and my family in ways that are too many to list and explain.”
All that, combined with her work, and home, explains Gilliland’s why. “It sounds corny that I love Lakewood Ranch as much as I do,” she says in an interview, “but I really just do love it.”
