From left, Dave Liniger and John Featherston. Photo by AJ Canaria.
During times of disruption and uncertainty, the best thing you can do is talk to someone who’s been there. Someone who’s lived through daunting challenges before, and not just survived, but come out the other side stronger. In the residential real estate ecosystem, no one fits that bill better than Dave Liniger.
In a special appearance at RISMedia’s 36th Annual CEO & Leadership Exchange, held in Washington, D.C., this past September, the RE/MAX co-founder and co-chair sat down with RISMedia Founder & CEO John Featherston to share his candid and provocative thoughts on overcoming obstacles, a message the audience of more than 400 real estate leaders sorely needed as they seek to cope with the foundational changes that have beset today’s residential real estate industry.
True to form, Liniger did not mince words, delivering advice that was both bare-bones and powerful.
“If you’re in the game, you have to play the cards you’re dealt, or you get out of the game.” This apt analogy is how Liniger characterized his approach to handling the changing tides of the real estate business, especially apropos at real estate’s first gathering post-August 17 mandate.
For Liniger, the current changes represent just one more evolution, hurdle and challenge in the course of doing business. And in his 60-plus years in real estate, he’s seen many.
“There’s been eight recessions since I got licensed back in the sixties,” Liniger explained. “And each time, we’ve had to adapt to different things that occurred. We couldn’t just throw the cards in and say, ‘I’m not going to play in this game anymore—I’ll just go be a bookkeeper, an accountant or something.’ We were here for the rest of our career.”
Of course, Liniger’s well-documented personal hardships tested his fortitude perhaps more than any market-driven occurrence. He pointed to the wheelchair he sat in as a perfect example. After suffering a life-threatening injury, Liniger was forced to make the decision to carry on…or give in.
“It’s not fun to be in a wheelchair, but what was I going to do?” he recounted. “Just lay in a bed in the hospital and let the world go away? Or just play the cards I was dealt? The thing is, that wheelchair is independence for somebody who can no longer get around. That wheelchair gives you personal independence to move yourself around and do 80% of what a normal person can do. And so we have to remember, in the real estate industry, we don’t get to pick the cards we’re dealt. We’re going to get dealt the cards, day by day, and you’re going to play the cards you get or you get out of the game.”
Playing the cards that were dealt was exactly what Liniger and the RE/MAX board did last September when they were just the second major real estate firm to settle the Burnett lawsuit for $55M, more than a month before the jury decided against NAR and the big brokerage defendants. For Liniger, who had never settled the more than 400 pieces of litigation RE/MAX had been involved in over the years, it was a decision made with the more than 140,000 worldwide RE/MAX agents top of mind.
“I’m a public company,” he explained. “If I’d still been a private company, I probably would’ve rolled the dice and said, ‘screw you, see you in court.’ We got the best law firm in the country. We had some ironclad reasons why we felt that we could win. But I also saw copycat lawsuits. If anybody loses one suit, it’s going to be a pile-on by every damn attorney in the world. And I thought for a $55 million insurance policy, I can get all of my agents, all my franchisees, all my shareholders, everybody in the open; we still have money and we can move on and forget the damn thing.”
Despite that seemingly sound logic, Liniger dealt with initial backlash over the decision. “You’d never believe the number of complaints that I got from agents and brokers who said, ‘Why did you cave? You’ve never backed off once in your life. Are you old? Have you lost your courage?’ And I said, no. The older I’ve got, the more common sense I’ve got. And instead of fighting, write the check—move on with our life.”
The naysayers quickly changed their minds, of course, when the copycat suits began accumulating. Liniger then received hundreds of notes lauding his decision and thanking him for his forward thinking.
With the settlement behind them and the industry thrust into change, Liniger offered insights into how real estate leaders can take advantage of opportunities woven into the new landscape. The first step was already underway at the CEO & Leadership Exchange: Coming together to share and exchange.
“The REALTOR® organization is a very unique organization,” said Liniger. “We will fight tooth and nail to get our listing against the competitor, but the minute that we have the listing done, we open up our house and say, anybody can sell it and I’ll share the commissions with you in some fashion. And so this cooperative attitude of having competitors that are willing to get up here and say, ‘this is what I’m doing’…there’s so many nuggets of information, and we’re in uncharted territories.”
Liniger shared a fitting analogy to describe the uncharted territory the real estate industry is now navigating post-settlement.
“I like to call it the son-in-law concept,” he said. “You finally get your son-in-law, and it’s not exactly what I expected. It’s certainly not what I hoped for. But he’s my son-in-law. This is our world gentlemen, ladies—adapt, adapt, adapt. This will go away.
“We have a lot of trouble on our horizon,” he added. “Even if the interest rates start inching down, until the treasury rates come down—that’s the real secret. But we have such a tremendous pent-up demand of people who want to own a house—there will be house-adjustment prices and eventually, the inventory problem will start to solve itself. So, if you’re in it for the long term, you play it for the long game. I’m looking at 10 years from now—it’s not about next week.”
Liniger closed his appearance with a profound reminder for the residential real estate executives in the room, the agents they lead and the consumers they serve.
“This is a great, great industry, no matter the picture people tried to make of it,” he said. “REALTORS® are the hardest-working people I’ve ever met in my life. We do everything on a gamble. We all get up every morning and we’ve got to go earn our check.”
