The recruiting conversation talks about splits, training and culture. Florida law talks about something else: who is allowed to pay you. Statute 475.42(1)(d) says a sales associate may not collect money in connection with a real estate brokerage transaction "except in the name of the employer and with the express consent of the employer," and may not commence or maintain an action for a commission "against any person except a person registered as her or his employer."
Read that twice, because it turns this into a different kind of decision than it looks like. The broker you register with is the only one who can pay your commission and the only one you can go after if they do not. Everything else in the presentation comes after that.
What registering binds
The same statute, at (1)(b), bars a licensed sales associate from operating as a broker and from operating as a sales associate "for any person not registered as her or his employer." This is not administrative housekeeping. It defines whose name you work under and whose name pays you.
There is a second point nobody explains on the way in, and it is the brokerage relationship with the client. Statute 475.278 sets a presumption: all licensees are presumed to operate as transaction brokers unless a single agent relationship, or no brokerage relationship, is established in writing with the customer. So the paperwork exists in order to be a single agent, not in order to walk someone through a house, and the brokerage you join has a way of handling that which is worth knowing beforehand.
What happens to your license between brokerages
If your license ends up involuntarily inactive, statute 475.183 sets the clock. Subsection (2)(b) says a license involuntarily inactive for more than two years automatically expires and becomes null and void with no further action by the commission or the department.
And coming back costs hours. Under subsection (2)(a), reactivating a license inactive for twelve months or less takes fourteen hours of continuing education, and between twelve and twenty-four months takes twenty-eight. Subsection (4) leaves a door open for illness or economic hardship, but it has to be used within six months of the license going void.
What that statute does not say is exactly what causes involuntarily inactive status, so do not take an interviewer's word on it: ask DBPR or your attorney. What is written down, and what matters for planning, is the two-year clock and the hours it costs to come back.
The money is already worked out, and it is not the percentage
The financial half of this decision has its own arithmetic, already done, in the commission models guide. The short version: a capped split does not leave you the percentage it advertises, and comparing two offers by percentage is the most reliable way to choose badly.
What is worth bringing over here is the order of the questions. First what you genuinely generate in a year, which decides whether a cap does anything for you. Then the percentage. Fees last, because that is where the difference between two offers that looked identical actually sits. If you do not know where to start with your own number, the state figures are in what realtors actually earn in Florida.
What the presentation leaves out
Four things decide what working there is like, and none of them tends to be on a slide:
- Who owns the leads. If the brokerage distributes leads, ask what happens to them when you leave, and get the answer in writing. It is the clause that costs the most to learn late.
- Who picks up when a file breaks. A contract falling apart at six on a Friday needs a broker on the phone, not a Slack channel. Ask how many agents there are per person who actually resolves things.
- What you take with you. Your contacts, your conversation history, your documents. If the answer is vague, the answer is no.
- What happens to a deal signed and not yet closed. That is the case that turns an orderly exit into a problem, and the answer belongs in the contract rather than in goodwill.
The questions you ask in writing
What sits in an email can be read again a year from now. What was said in a meeting cannot. These six get asked in writing and kept:
- The full contract, with any policy manual it refers to. Fees usually live in the manual, not the contract.
- The percentage, the cap, and the amount of gross commission at which that cap is reached.
- Whether the twelve-month period starts in January or on your start date.
- What is charged per transaction before and after the cap, and what fixed dues there are.
- What happens to brokerage leads and to open files if you leave.
- Who the broker of record is and their license number, which you can check yourself in the public DBPR registry.
Nearly half of Florida brokerages are one person
Nobody has to be asked for this: DBPR publishes the licence roll and it can be counted. We downloaded the sales associate and broker extract on October 13, 2026 and counted it. There are 448,541 records, of which 309,358 are both Current and Active: 242,772 sales associates, 42,702 brokers and 23,884 broker associates.
Those active licensees are spread across 34,801 companies. And here is the figure that changes how an offer looks: the median is two agents per brokerage. The mean works out to 8.7, and the gap between the two already tells the story.
- 45.4% of brokerages have exactly one active agent. That is 15,795 companies, holding 5.2% of all licensees.
- Another 36.3% have between two and five. Which means eight in ten Florida brokerages have five agents or fewer.
- Only 329 brokerages have between 101 and 500 agents, which is 0.9% of them.
- And 61 brokerages, 0.2% of the total, have more than 500. Those 61 hold 27.9% of every active licensee in the state.
The ten largest hold 12.8% of active licensees and the hundred largest hold 32.9%. Put the other way round: a third of the roll works at a hundred companies and the other two thirds are spread across nearly thirty-five thousand.
By county, active licensees concentrate where you would expect: Dade 47,815, Broward 33,683, Palm Beach 28,114, Orange 20,777 and Hillsborough 15,686. A further 12,000 carry an out-of-state address.
The brands, and the two ways of being big
Counting brands takes a second file, because the roll carries the registered company name of whoever employs you rather than the trade name: "Keller Williams" appears eleven times across the 448,541 records, since each office is registered as its own company. The brand lives in the DBA field of the corporations file, where Keller Williams shows up 151 times. The two join on the company licence number, and 91.6% match.
Joined up, this is what existed on October 13, 2026:
- Keller Williams: 10,087 active agents across 75 companies.
- Coldwell Banker: 9,675 across 45.
- LPT Realty: 7,154 across 4.
- eXp Realty: 6,860 across 2.
- Charles Rutenberg 4,852 across 6. RE/MAX: 4,146 across 108. Compass: 3,904 across 32.
- The Keyes Company 3,419, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices 3,373 and Century 21 3,346 across 75.
Look at the second column, because that is where the interesting part is. RE/MAX spreads 4,146 agents across 108 companies: an average of 38 per office, each with its own owner and its own policies. eXp spreads 6,860 across two. Those are two different ways of being big, and they do not mean the same thing for you: in one you negotiate with the owner of your office, in the other with a national policy that is not negotiable.
And the figure that puts all of the above in perspective: 73.9% of active licensees with an employer work at a brokerage with no franchise brand at all. That is 222,711 people. The largest of them is LoKation, with 3,708. If you are only comparing franchises, you are looking at a quarter of the market.
A note on how that count is built, because you need it to decide whether to trust it: DBPR publishes no "brand" field. The assignment works by looking for each franchise name in the employing company's DBA and, failing that, in its registered name. Whatever matches none of them is not distributed among the others, it is counted separately. The script is in the repository and the count can be repeated.
Two warnings for anyone repeating the count. DBPR's page notes the downloads refresh weekly and can lag during maintenance, so the online public search serves better for verifying one specific licence. And the extract carries each licensee's mailing address, so it is not a file to leave lying around.
The six-month test
A brokerage is chosen on what month six will be like, not month one. Month one has a presentation, a welcome and someone paying attention to you. Month six has a stuck contract, an unhappy client and a question that needs an answer in twenty minutes.
So the most useful question in the interview is the last one: "can you put me in touch with someone who has been here two years, and with someone who left?" The second half of that sentence is the half that informs.
And once you are in, what tells you whether the decision was good is your own numbers. The seven that warn you before a year goes wrong are in another guide, and they fit in a spreadsheet. If your brokerage runs on Galilei Hub, the Sales Book works them out at closing, but that is their decision and not yours.