Leaving your brokerage website: what you keep and what you lose

What leaves with you depends on whose name is on each piece. A domain registered to you, the contacts you’re entitled to export and a Google Business Profile you own come along. A site on your brokerage’s domain, a brokerage email address and the IDX feed your old broker authorized stay behind. Check who owns each one before you give notice, build the new site before your license moves, and set up 301 redirects anywhere you control the old addresses.

A website your brokerage provides is convenient right up to the day you leave. Then the question becomes which parts of your online presence were ever yours.

What follows is general. Your contractor agreement, your MLS and your state’s rules decide the specifics. This isn’t legal advice, so check anything that matters with your broker or an attorney.

What do you actually own?

Anything registered in your name or held in an account you control. Everything else belongs to whoever holds the account, even if your name and photo are on it.

Who owns your domain?

The registrant on record, and whoever controls the registrar account. Check both first, because every other step depends on the answer.

Three setups are common.

Your site lives on the brokerage’s domain. Addresses like yourname.brokerage.com or brokerage.com/agents/yourname belong to the brokerage. You can’t take them with you, and you can’t redirect them, because whoever controls a domain decides where every address under it points. When we started rebuilding one Kansas City agent’s website, the website listed on his brokerage profile forwarded to the brokerage’s homepage. That was the domain owner’s decision, not his.

You own a domain, and it points at a brokerage or vendor platform. The good case. You change where it points when the new site is ready.

Someone else registered a domain with your name in it. A vendor or a brokerage may have bought yourname.com on your behalf. Ask for it to be transferred into a registrar account in your name. ICANN’s registrant FAQ on transferring a domain explains the process, and ICANN Lookup shows which registrar holds any domain.

Two details people miss. First, if your registrar account uses your brokerage email, change it now, before you lose that inbox and every password reset sent to it. Second, keep renewing any old domain after you move. Google’s Change of Address guidance recommends paying for an old domain for at least a year so no one else can buy it.

Where do your leads and contacts live?

In whatever system captured them. Your independent contractor agreement decides who owns them.

If the brokerage provided your website, its inquiries most likely went into a system the brokerage also provides, and your access to those records usually ends when you leave.

Before you give notice, read your agreement for three things:

• Lead ownership. Some agreements treat leads the company generated or paid for differently from your own sphere.
• The database. Who owns the contact records and their history.
• Listings and pending deals. Which ones stay with the firm and which, if any, go with you. Get this in writing from your broker.

Then export what you’re entitled to while you still have access, and keep a copy outside any CRM. Our guide to switching CRMs without losing your database covers what to export and the order to do it in. If you’d rather your contacts live in an account in your own name from now on, Workspace Free, coming soon, has room for 100,000 contacts and exports any time. If the agreement’s language is unclear, ask before you export, not after.

What happens to your IDX search?

It stops with your old broker and starts again under the new one, because the feed runs on your broker’s authority, not yours. (Our explainer on how IDX works covers the basics.)

NAR’s IDX policy (Policy Statement 7.58, as of 2026), which REALTOR-affiliated MLSs follow, is built this way. IDX displays must be under the “actual and apparent control” of the participant, which is the broker. MLSs may let agents use IDX on their own sites, but that use is “subject to the affiliated participants’ consent and control.” Every display must “clearly identify the name of the brokerage firm under which they operate,” and participants must notify the MLS before displaying IDX.

In practice, a move looks like this:

1. Your new broker authorizes IDX for your site, and the MLS is notified.
2. Your website provider switches the feed and puts the new brokerage’s name on every page.
3. If you’re changing MLSs too, the new MLS has its own agreement and display rules.

State advertising rules sit on top of that. Texas, for example, requires the broker’s name in each advertisement, at least half the size of the largest agent or team contact information, and defines advertising to include the internet (TREC Rule 535.155). Check your own state’s version.

That sets the timing. You can’t publish the new brokerage’s name before your license moves, so build the new site privately, get your new broker’s sign-off, and switch it on the day the transfer takes effect.

Will you lose your Google rankings?

You keep what’s tied to URLs you control and lose what’s tied to URLs you don’t. Permanent redirects are how you carry it across.

If the old site was on a domain you own, set up server-side permanent (301) redirects from every old URL to the closest page on the new site. Google’s site move guide (updated August 2026) recommends server-side permanent redirects and says to “keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year.” Keep URLs the same where you can. Google’s Change of Address guidance notes that combining a move with a redesign and a new URL structure will probably cost some traffic while Google reassesses the pages.

If you’re moving to a new domain and own both, the Search Console Change of Address tool helps. It has limits: you must be an owner of both the old and new properties in Search Console, and it works only at the domain level, not for a path like brokerage.com/agents/yourname.

If the old site was on the brokerage’s domain, you can’t redirect it yourself. Ask the brokerage to point your old page at your new site. If they won’t, the page’s history stays with them and your new domain starts from zero, which is the best argument for owning your domain from day one.

Then update every link you control: your Google Business Profile, portal profiles, social bios, email signature and directory listings. Google’s guide suggests prioritizing links by how many visits each one sends. It also warns that visibility in search “may fluctuate temporarily during the move,” so plan for a dip rather than being surprised by one.

What about your Google Business Profile?

If you’re the primary owner, it stays yours, so update it the day you move. If someone at the brokerage owns it, request ownership now.

Google’s guidelines for representing your business treat real estate agents as individual practitioners, who may have their own profile if they’re public-facing and can be reached at the verified location during stated hours. Where several practitioners share a location, the practitioner’s profile name “should include only the name of the practitioner, and shouldn’t include the name of the organization.” If you’ve followed that, your profile name doesn’t change when your brokerage does.

What does change:

• Website. Point it at your own domain.
• Phone. Google says the number “must be under the direct control of the business.” A line the brokerage issued won’t be once you leave.
• Address. If your profile shows the old office, update it. Google says a business that moves to a new address after verification must verify again.

To take over a profile someone else owns, request ownership. Google emails the current owner, who has 3 days to respond.

What happens to your email?

An address on your brokerage’s domain belongs to the brokerage. Move to an address on your own domain before you go.

• Set up email on your domain with SPF and DKIM. Since February 1, 2024, Gmail has required every sender to set up SPF or DKIM, and bulk senders need both plus DMARC.
• Move every login and recovery address off the brokerage email: registrar, MLS, portal profiles, CRM, Search Console, Business Profile and social accounts.
• Tell clients and your sphere where to reach you, and ask the brokerage whether it will run an auto-reply on your old address for a while.

What’s the full move checklist?

What’s the one thing to do this week?

Log in to your domain registrar and check two things: that the domain is registered to you, and that the account email is one you’ll still have next year. If either answer is no, fix it before anything else. Every other step in this post gets easier once the domain is yours.

If you’re planning a move, our head-to-head comparisons lay out the options, and you can see what our agent websites cost or get a free preview of your new site before your license changes.