Bob Cherot, October 1994
To celebrate 25 years of serving Canada’s real estate community, REM asked a small group of real estate leaders this question:
“Who had the biggest impact – good or bad – on Canadian real estate in the last 25 years?
This is not a popularity contest or a marketing exercise. We want to know who you think had the biggest impact on the industry in the last 25 years – even if it was, in your opinion, a negative impact. Your choices could include Realtors, company executives, association executive officers, regulators, service company executives….even politicians! Who has had the most impact during the last 25 years in making the industry what it is today?”
REM took those consensus picks and added our own and the results will be revealed on REM online every day until the end of June. Take a look and see if you agree with these choices, and then let us know who we missed. Add your comments below or drop an email to [email protected].
Bob Cherot
The first Re/Max office in Canada was opened by Don Fernie in Calgary, but it was the late Bob Cherot who bought the regional rights and opened Re/Max of Western Canada in 1980.
“He had been in the grocery business and he understood what it took to build a western organization,” Re/Max International founder Dave Liniger told REM for the June 2005 issue. “He was an absolute prince of a man.”
Elton Ash, regional EVP of Re/Max of Western Canada, says Cherot along with Frank Polzler and Walter Schneider in Ontario/Atlantic Canada and Pierre Titley in Quebec “pioneered a new unheard-of concept and built a national franchise organization that has dominated the Canadian real estate scene.”
He says among other accomplishments, “In 1989 Revenue Canada determined that Re/Max sales associates were truly self-employed, not employees, therefore realizing significant tax advantages for sales associates. This has become the norm in the real estate industry. Agent self-incorporation was introduced in Western Canada in 1990, which then went on to develop into personal real estate incorporations in British Columbia.”
When Cherot retired, he sold the territory back to Re/Max International. “We just had a handshake agreement – between two gentlemen who respected each other a great deal,” Liniger says.
