The rule that decides what your Instagram profile has to look like was written in 2007 and has not changed since. It runs to four short subsections, it lives in rule 61J2-10.025 of the Florida Administrative Code, and almost everything it asks of you fits in two sentences.
Here they are. Every real estate advertisement must include the licensed name of the brokerage firm, and when the advertisement sits on an internet site that name has to go next to your contact information, or immediately above or immediately below it. If your bio carries a phone number and your brokerage name is not beside it, the advertisement does not comply.
What the rule says, and what it never defines
Subsection (1) asks for three things in three sentences. That "all advertising must be in a manner in which reasonable persons would know they are dealing with a real estate licensee". That "all real estate advertisements must include the licensed name of the brokerage firm". And that no advertisement placed by a licensee be "fraudulent, false, deceptive or misleading".
What the rule never defines, anywhere, is what counts as a real estate advertisement. There is no list of media, no size threshold, no carve-out for personal branding. It says all advertising, and that is where the text stops. So whether a reel of you talking about the market is an advertisement has no answer in the code, and the place to settle it is with your broker, who answers for the advertising that comes out of the office.
Online, the name goes next to the point of contact
Subsection (3)(a) is the one almost nobody follows, and it is very specific. The brokerage firm name "shall be placed adjacent to or immediately above or below the point of contact information". The rule then defines that phrase: "any means by which to contact the brokerage firm or individual licensee including mailing address(es), physical street address(es), email address(es), telephone number(s) or facsimile telephone number(s)".
Read it where it bites. The duty is not that the name appear somewhere on the page. It is that the name sit beside every means by which someone can reach you. A brokerage name in the website footer and a phone number in the header satisfy the first reading and not this one.
Subsection (3)(b) closes the last gap, the one where the internet is somehow a different animal: the remaining requirements of subsections (1) and (2) apply to advertising on a site on the internet too.
Your surname, the way the Commission has it
Subsection (2) takes ten seconds to read and rules out a fair number of profiles. When your personal name appears in the advertisement, "at the very least the licensee’s last name must be used in the manner in which it is registered with the Commission".
This is not paperwork. If you registered under two surnames and advertise under one, or your brand name is a shortened version of the registered one, the advertisement does not comply even though everyone in your county knows who you are. It is one of the few items on this list you can fix in an afternoon.
Your team name: fifteen words it cannot contain
Teams have a rule of their own and it is far more recent. Rule 61J2-10.026 was created in June 2018 and the version in force dates from November 2021. It defines team advertising as "a name or logo used by one or more real estate licensees who represent themselves to the public as a team or group", all of them working under the supervision of the same broker or brokerage.
Its subsection (4) allows the words "team" and "group" inside the name, then lists the ones it forbids. There are fifteen, and they group by what they suggest:
- Corporate form: Company, Corporation, Corp., Inc., LLC, LP, LLP and Partnership.
- Brokerage: Agency, Associates, Brokerage and Brokers.
- And the four that sting, because half the market uses them: Properties, Property, Real Estate and Realty.
- Plus a catch-all for "similar words suggesting the team or group is a separate real estate brokerage or company".
"Lopez Properties" is not a lawful team name in Florida. "The Lopez Team" is. And subsection (6) adds a condition that belongs to design rather than wording: the team name cannot be set in larger print than the name of the registered brokerage.
Two subsections are internal duties, the kind that go unmet for years because nobody looks at them. Subsection (2) requires each team to file with the broker a designated licensee responsible for keeping the advertising compliant. Subsection (3) requires the broker to maintain a current written record of each team’s members, at least once a month.
The law that is not in chapter 475
One statute says nothing about licences and applies to every housing advertisement you publish. Statute 760.23(3), part of the Florida Fair Housing Act, makes it unlawful to make, print or publish any notice, statement or advertisement about the sale or rental of a dwelling "that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination" based on race, color, national origin, sex, disability, familial status or religion, or an intention to make one.
The verb in the statute is "indicates". It does not ask about intent and it does not wait for a complaint: it looks at what the advertisement communicates. Which is why the slippery ground is not slurs, which nobody writes, but the sentences that describe the ideal occupant instead of describing the house. Familial status and disability are both on that list of seven.
What it costs
The penalties are published in advance. Rule 61J2-24.001 sets a range per violation and says in its first subsection why it exists: "to give notice to licensees of the range of penalties which normally will be imposed". For false, deceptive or misleading advertising, which is statute 475.25(1)(c), the range reads:
- First violation: from a $1,000 administrative fine and a 30-day suspension to a $2,500 fine and a 90-day suspension.
- Second and subsequent violations: from $2,500 to $5,000 in fines, and from a 90-day suspension to revocation of the licence.
A few rows up the same table sits the office sign, where the penalty starts lower: failing to maintain an office or a sign at its entrance runs, on a first violation, from a reprimand with a $500 fine to a three-month suspension with a $1,000 fine.
The range then moves with the aggravating and mitigating circumstances listed in subsection (4) of that same rule, so the figures above are the frame and not the sentence.
The office sign is still mandatory
Statute 475.22(1) requires every active broker to maintain an office "which shall consist of at least one enclosed room" in a building of stationary construction, and to post a sign at the entrance of the principal office and of each branch office, readable and visible to anyone about to walk in. The sign carries the broker’s name, the trade name if there is one, and at a minimum the words "licensed real estate broker" or "lic. real estate broker".
If you work from home and your brokerage keeps its office in another county, this one belongs to the broker and not to you. Worth knowing anyway, because the licence that pays you is the one that answers for it. What to ask about that before you register is in how to choose a brokerage, and the licence route from the start is in the requirements guide.
The checklist
Nine things to review once and leave fixed. Most of them are copying a name into a field:
- Your brokerage’s licensed name on every advertisement, not the brand version and not the abbreviation.
- In your Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn bio: that name adjacent to, above or below the phone number, the email and the address.
- The same across your website, on every page carrying a means of contact, and not only in the footer.
- Your surname exactly as it is registered with the Commission.
- Your team name free of all fifteen words in subsection (4).
- The team name set in type no larger than the brokerage’s.
- A licensee designated in writing with your broker as responsible for the team’s advertising.
- No housing advertisement that describes who should live there instead of describing the house.
- Your portal and MLS profiles, not just your social accounts: the rule says all advertising.
What this guide cannot tell you
Whether a given format counts as advertising. The rule in force dates from 2007 and speaks of "a site on the Internet", a phrase written before half of real estate advertising moved inside apps. The Commission knows: it published a notice of rule development on 16 August 2021 (volume 47, number 158) whose stated purpose was "to include requirements of other forms of advertising via internet". The rule’s history still ends on 5 February 2007, so that amendment has not been adopted and the old text is the one that binds.
Nor the rules of your MLS or your association, which are contractual and do not come out of this chapter, nor the use of the REALTOR mark, which NAR sets and publishes on its own terms. This guide covers what the state of Florida requires, which is the part that gets paid for with a licence.