Fully furnished

The furniture business is tied to real estate in more ways than you might think.

The five brothers who own Matter Brothers Furniture have benefited from the housing recovery in Florida, of course. People have been buying homes and furnishing them, boosting the Fort Myers-based company's revenues by nearly 13% in 2012 to $35 million.

But Matter Brothers has owned the commercial buildings and the land on which its stores operate, and the brothers say that was a key to surviving the economic bust of recent years.