Hello everyone and welcome to At Bairns. I'm Andy Surwer. And welcome to our guest, Dave Lindiger,

co-founder and chairman of Remax, an author of the new book, The Perfect Ten. Dave, great to see it.

Thanks for joining us. Nice to be here. So I want to ask you about that book and the title.

And there's so much also to ask you about the real estate business right now.

But let's start maybe with your company. You founded Remax in 1973. Tell us about that. What was your vision and what does the name mean of the company?

First place, the name was we didn't want to call it Dave Lindiger Realty.

And so at the time, Exxon had changed their name somehow.

Five letters through a slash mark.

We sat around, we thought, what's the company about?

It's a maximum service for the customer maximum commission for the agent

so we came up with real estate maximums shortened it to r e max and thought somebody's going to think there's a man with that name or a woman that owns a company so we took out the periods and just

threw in a slash and it was remex and found it in 73.

Most real estate agents split their commissions with the brokerage on about a 50-50 basis.

The top producers eventually said, why am I giving a path?

I'll start my own small company.

We thought, why not have a business like a co-op of doctors,

lawyers, architects, share the office space, keep the majority of the income for yourself,

and do better together than by yourself. Very adversarial to the powers to be.

They were only paying people a 50% commission split.

We thought that under our conditions, they could probably make an 85% split.

And so the powerful brokers said, well, that can't be good for the industry,

because we're going to have to lose a lot of money on this.

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