Gail Main had never flown in a seaplane. It was October 1983, in Ontario, and she and her fiancé and business partner, Dave Liniger, were hosting Canadian affiliates of the company they had started ten years earlier. Lifting off from a lake cabin, the plane went into a stall-spin and sputtered into the trees. She was in a coma for three weeks. When she woke, a doctor told her she had a traumatic brain injury, was paralyzed on her left side and would not walk again. She grabbed him by his white coat. “You get this straight. I am walking out of here.”
She did, after a year of motivational tapes and rehab. “She never once cried. She never once said, ‘Why me?’” Dave Liniger told the Journal. They married in June 1984. She ran Remax as chief executive from 1991 to 2002 and held leadership roles until 2018. She died Aug. 21 at home in Castle Rock, Colo., at 81.
The model, and the woman who kept it solvent
The company she helped build did something the industry considered heresy in 1973: agents kept 100% of their commissions and paid Remax a fee for advertising and management. Fifty years later most of the industry has copied it. But the model nearly died in its first year. The Arab oil embargo flattened the housing market, the backers pulled out, and the company was more than $600,000 in debt, hounded by bill collectors and, briefly, the IRS. Dave Liniger, by his own account, flailed. Gail leveled with him: “You can’t handle the bill collectors. It’s against your personality.” She took over the finances, won the creditors’ trust and negotiated payment plans until the company had peeled itself out of short-term debt.
That set the division of labor for decades: he spent 200 days a year on the road recruiting; she “would handle everything else.” The company grew from under 5,000 agents in 1983 to 50,000 by 1998 to more than 145,000 in 120 countries today, largely, its chief marketing officer said, by hiring the women agents established male brokers dismissed. Gail was the first woman in senior leadership at any national real-estate company. In 1991 the Journal reported the company was “undermining the whole real-estate brokerage system.” “I think they loved being the target,” the marketing chief said. Last month Remax was sold to The Real Brokerage for roughly $880 million including debt.
Our read
Two things in this obituary are the kind of thing we try to say in every planning meeting, and she said them better. The first is about temperament. The founder who could sell anything could not open the mail from the creditors, and the company survived because someone else could. Households divide this way too. One person cannot look at the statement in a bad quarter; the other cannot stop looking. The plan works when the couple knows which is which and assigns the job accordingly, and it fails when the wrong person is holding the phone when the bill collector calls.
The second is the hospital bed. A prognosis is a forecast, and she treated it as one — a probability, not an instruction. This desk publishes odds, windows and scenarios in exactly that spirit, and the September letter said it plainly: a prediction needs the world to cooperate; a plan only needs you to follow it on the day it stops being fun. She followed hers for a year in a rehab room. It is the best description of a dated plan we have read this month.