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Domain Names
Registering a domain in your own name, which is the one thing that survives a brokerage change.
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Web Hosting for Real Estate Agents
Agents change brokerage. It is normal, it happens more than once in a career, and almost nothing on your desk survives it. Your licence does. Your database does, if you kept it. Your website usually does not, because web hosting for real estate agents is so often paid for by somebody else.
The week you change brokerage
Here is the failure, and it is common enough that most agents have either lived it or watched a colleague live it.
You move to a new brokerage. The old office deactivates your agent page and your name@oldbrokerage.com address in the same batch of admin work, usually within days. Nothing malicious happens. Somebody simply removes a departed agent from the system, which is exactly what they are supposed to do.
What breaks is quiet. Every past client has your old address in their phone and in their email history. So does every lender, every attorney, every inspector and every agent you have ever co-operated with. The one seller who was going to refer you to their sister sends a message that bounces, or worse, does not bounce and simply goes to whoever inherits the mailbox. You never learn that it happened.
The website part is the same story. If your listings and your bio lived on the brokerage domain, the URL you put on the back of every card for four years now goes nowhere, or lands on a page belonging to somebody else.
Test this before you need it. Send a message from your phone to your own brokerage address, then ask what happens to that mailbox and that page if you resign. The answer is usually "it is switched off," and it is much better to hear it now.
Put the domain in your name, not the office's
AldoMedia has set up agents in Western New York since 1999. We will register the domain in your own name, put your email on it and host the small site it needs, so a brokerage change costs you a logo and nothing else.
Put web hosting for real estate agents in your own name
The fix is not complicated and it is not expensive. Register a domain in your own name, put your email on it, and point it at hosting you pay for. Then it does not matter whose logo is on the building.
Your brokerage will still want you using their branding, and depending on your state and your agreement there are rules about how you present yourself, what you must disclose about your affiliation, and whose name has to appear where. Those rules are real and they vary. Check with your broker and, where it matters, your own adviser. What they almost never say is that you cannot own a domain.
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Register the domain yourself
In your name, with your card, in your own account. Not the brokerage's account, not a marketing vendor's account, not your nephew's. If somebody else registers it for you, ask for the login before you need it. Our page on choosing a domain name covers what actually makes a good one, and for an agent the answer is almost always your own name.
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Put your email on that domain
you@yourname.com is the address that follows you from office to office for the rest of your career. Set it up once and never change it again. That is the whole point of it.
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Give it somewhere to live
A site with your bio, your service area, a way to reach you and the listings you can legally show. This is a small site with light traffic, so shared hosting is the right product and the entry tier is normally enough.
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Put your renewals on autopilot
A domain that lapses takes the email with it, and the recovery is worse than the renewal ever was. See domain expiration for what actually happens and how quickly.
Do that and a brokerage change becomes a change of logo and a change of disclosure text on one page. Not a rebuild, and not a lost database.
IDX feeds, and what they cost to run
IDX is the arrangement that lets your site display listings from the MLS rather than only your own. Agents want it because a site with search on it feels like a real estate site. It is also the single most expensive and most misunderstood thing you can bolt onto a personal site.
Three separate costs sit behind it, and they are usually quoted to you as one.
- The MLS side. Access is licensed, there is often a fee, and there is paperwork. Rules on what you may display, how listings must be attributed and how often data must refresh come from your MLS and your board, not from your host. Ask them directly rather than taking a vendor's summary of it.
- The IDX vendor. Somebody has to take the feed and turn it into pages. This is a monthly product, and it is the part people forget when comparing website quotes.
- The hosting load. This is the smallest of the three and the one people worry about most. A feed that imports thousands of listings into your site can make it heavy, but that is a caching and configuration question before it is a plan-size question.
Whether you need it at all
Be honest about how people search. Most buyers are already searching on the big national portals, and your IDX search is competing with an app they already have on their phone. It rarely wins on search. It wins when a client you already have wants a private list from you, or when you use it to build genuinely local pages that the portals do not bother with.
If your business comes from referrals and past clients, which for most established agents it does, an IDX feed is a monthly bill buying you very little. Spend that money on the pages people actually read about you.
The pages that follow you, and the ones that do not
A listing is temporary by design. It goes live, it closes, and the page either disappears or sits there going stale. Nobody searches for a house that sold two years ago except the person who bought it.
The pages that keep working are the ones about you and about where you work. They do not expire, they do not need a feed, and they are yours.
- A real bio. Not the three lines the brokerage template allowed. How long you have been licensed, what kind of transactions you actually do most, where you live.
- The neighbourhoods and towns you genuinely work in, described by somebody who has walked them. This is the one thing a national portal cannot do, and it is where you can win.
- What working with you is like, step by step, for a first-time buyer and for a seller. People read this before they call.
- Reviews and closed-transaction stories in your own words, with permission, on your own domain.
- A phone number and a form that both work on a phone, because a large majority of the people reading this are on one.
When you change brokerage, none of that content needs rewriting. You update the affiliation and the branding and carry on. That is the difference between a site you own and an agent page somebody else rents to you.
If a previous vendor built your site and you have never had the login, sort that out while everyone is still on good terms. Taking over a website explains what to ask for and in what order.
Change brokerage without missing an offer
We do the switchover in the safe order, mailboxes tested before anything points at them, so you never lose a day of mail. Call 716-771-2536. If your current setup is already fine, we will tell you that instead.
Who should not buy this
This page is written for an individual licensed agent looking after their own name. If you run the office, it is the wrong page for you.
A broker has a different set of problems. Agent pages that get created and removed as people join and leave, email addresses to issue and revoke, roster changes, and a domain that has to serve a whole team rather than one person. That is an administration question as much as a hosting one, and the sizing is different. Start at hosting for real estate brokers instead. The short version of the difference: this page is about one person keeping their identity portable, that page is about an office managing many identities that come and go.
There are also agents who should spend less than they are about to.
- If you are newly licensed, buy the domain and the email now and skip everything else. That order matters more than the site does.
- You do not need a large plan. A personal agent site is a handful of pages and some photographs. Volume of showings has nothing to do with server size.
- You do not need an IDX feed to look legitimate. A good bio and honest local pages do more.
- You do not need a separate site for every town you cover. One site with real pages beats five thin ones, and search engines treat the thin ones as what they are.
Where spending more is fair: you run a team with several agents under your name, you are producing video and want it hosted properly, or your site carries a genuinely busy IDX search rather than a link to one.
Moving without breaking your email
The most nervous moment in any of this is the switchover, and the fear is usually about email rather than the website. It is a reasonable fear. An agent who cannot receive mail for a day is an agent missing an offer.
The order of operations is what keeps it safe. Build the new site and confirm it works before anything points at it. Set the mailboxes up on the new side and confirm you can send and receive on them. Only then change what the domain points to, and change it deliberately rather than all at once. The DNS management page explains which record does what, and email migration covers bringing existing mail across rather than leaving it behind.
If you are coming off a brokerage address rather than moving an existing domain, there is no migration to do. There is a forwarding period and a lot of quiet housekeeping: update your signature, your cards, your portal profiles, your board records, and message your past clients once with the new address. Do that while the old mailbox is still alive, not after.
How AldoMedia helps
AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999, and agent sites are familiar work, including the awkward ones where a brokerage or a former marketing company still holds the domain. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, and we will tell you plainly when the entry plan is all you need.
If you want to know what you would actually be paying for, what a website costs to run lays out the pieces. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us who currently holds your domain and we will start there.
Common questions
Real estate website questions
My brokerage gives me a website and an email address. Why pay for my own?
Because both of them belong to the brokerage. When you leave, the agent page and the mailbox are usually switched off within days as normal admin, and every past client, lender and co-operating agent then has a dead address for you. A domain in your own name costs a small amount a year and follows you for the rest of your career. Keep using the brokerage tools as well if you like. Just do not let them be the only way anyone can reach you.
Am I allowed to have my own website while I am with a brokerage?
Almost always yes, but how you present yourself is governed by your state licensing rules, your board and your agreement with your broker. There are usually requirements about disclosing your affiliation and displaying the brokerage name. Those vary by state and change over time, so ask your broker and your own adviser rather than relying on a hosting company's summary. The domain ownership question is separate and rarely restricted.
Do I need an IDX feed on my site?
Fewer agents need one than buy one. It carries three costs: the MLS licence and paperwork, the monthly IDX vendor, and a heavier site. Your search box is also competing with an app the buyer already has installed. If your business runs on referrals and past clients, put that money into a real bio and genuinely local pages instead. IDX earns its keep when you use it to serve clients you already have.
What should I use for my domain, my name or something about the area?
Your name, in most cases. It is the thing that stays true when you change brokerage, change speciality or change the towns you cover, and it is what past clients will actually remember and type. Area-based domains age badly the moment your business shifts a few miles. If your name is taken, adding your market or the word realty is usually better than inventing something clever.
How much hosting does a solo agent actually need?
Less than most are sold. A bio, service-area pages, a contact form and some photographs is a light site, and an entry shared plan runs it comfortably. The number of showings you do has no bearing on server size. Spending more makes sense if you run a team, host your own video, or carry a busy IDX search rather than linking to one.
I am leaving my brokerage next month. What do I set up first?
The domain and the email, in that order, and do it while the old mailbox is still live. Get you@yourname.com working, then message your past clients and referral partners from it once so the new address lands in their history. The website can follow a few weeks later. Losing the site for a month costs you very little. Losing the ability to receive an offer costs you a deal.
Related
Business Email
Why you@yourname.com beats a brokerage address you lose access to on your last day.
Read about business emailTaking Over a Website
What to ask for when a brokerage or a former vendor still holds your domain and logins.
How to take controlEvery trade we cover is listed on hosting by industry.
Hero image: Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.
Make your address portable before you need it to be
Tell us who currently holds your domain and your email and we will tell you what it takes to get them into your own name. If you are already set up properly, we will say so.
Get Your Web Hosting Plan Get help choosing
Or call 716-771-2536 and tell us what the site has to do. If the plan you are already on is the right one, we will say so.