Microsoft 365
Administered mailboxes for a whole office, where the brokerage holds the keys rather than the agent.
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Web Hosting for Real Estate Brokers
A brokerage hosts other people's careers. Every mailbox, agent page and listing feed you hand an agent is something you will one day have to take back, usually on short notice and usually while that agent is on their way to a competitor. Almost every decision about web hosting for real estate brokers is really a decision about that day.
Web hosting for real estate brokers serves people who may leave
An independent agent has one website and one mailbox to worry about. You have thirty of each, and turnover is normal in this business rather than a crisis. That is the whole difference, and it changes what you should buy and how you should set it up.
Here is how it goes wrong. An agent joins, somebody sets up firstname@yourbrokerage.com so they can get started, and the password goes straight to the agent. Two years later they move to a competitor. The mailbox is technically yours, but in practice it is theirs. Their past clients still write to that address. Their signs still carry it. Nobody in the office has the password, the recovery details point at their personal phone, and the only way to get it back is to ask nicely.
Nothing about that is a hosting failure. The hosting worked exactly as configured. It is an ownership failure, and it is entirely preventable at setup, which is the only time it is cheap to fix.
The test for any account you provide is simple. If that person stopped answering the phone tomorrow, could you get into it today, without them? If the answer is no, it is not really the brokerage's account.
Set the mailboxes up so you hold the keys
Send us the list of agent addresses at your domain and who set each one up. We will show you which ones the brokerage could get into tomorrow without the agent, and which ones need fixing now.
Mailboxes the brokerage actually controls
Mail is where this bites hardest, because mail carries the client relationship. A listing page can be rebuilt in an afternoon. Three years of correspondence with past buyers cannot.
The structural fix is to run every mailbox under one administered account belonging to the brokerage, with an administrator who is not the agent. That means someone in the office, usually the broker or an office manager, can reset a password, read what needs reading during a handover, and shut an account off the same hour a departure becomes real. On a hosted mail platform such as Microsoft 365 that is a normal administrator function. On the mailboxes bundled with shared hosting it is done through the control panel. Either can work. What does not work is an agent creating their own account somewhere and you finding out later.
Three habits that make the difference
- Create the mailbox from the brokerage administrator account, never from the agent's own device.
- Set recovery to an office phone and an office address, not the agent's mobile. This is the single most-skipped step and the one that hurts most.
- Keep a written list of every address at your domain and who holds it. It goes stale within months if nobody owns it, so give someone that job.
It is also worth deciding early whether an agent gets a mailbox at your domain at all. Some brokerages give everyone one. Some give it only to staff and let agents use their own branded addresses. Both are defensible. What causes trouble is doing it inconsistently and not writing down which is which. If you are moving an office onto a properly administered platform, the sequence that keeps mail flowing during the change is on the email migration page.
Agent pages, and what happens to them on the way out
Most brokerage sites carry a page per agent: photo, bio, phone, a few listings. They are useful. They also rank, sometimes better than the agent's own site, and that is exactly why they become a problem the day someone leaves.
Delete the page and every link to it from your site, from directories, from that agent's old email signatures now points at nothing. Leave it up and you are advertising a competitor's agent on your own domain, with your phone number attached to someone who no longer works for you.
The workable middle is to redirect. The old agent page sends visitors to your general agent directory, so the link keeps working, the search value stays on your site, and nobody lands on a dead end. It takes a couple of minutes on any ordinary hosting plan. It is not a feature you buy, it is a habit you keep.
The departure sequence
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Change the mailbox password first
Before the conversation, not after. Then set an auto-reply and forward to the office or to whoever is taking over those clients, so nothing sent to that address disappears.
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Take the agent page down and redirect it
Point the old address at your agent directory. Then check the site for the same photo and phone number appearing in team pages, testimonials and listing bylines.
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Reassign the listings
Whatever feeds your listings needs the agent record changed, or their name sits under active properties for weeks.
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Remove access, not just presence
Website logins, the CRM, any shared drive, any social account where they were an administrator. Presence and access are different jobs and people usually only do the first.
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Write down what you just did
The next departure is easier if the last one left a checklist. Most offices rebuild this from memory every single time.
None of this is difficult. It is only difficult when it is improvised on the day, which is when it always gets improvised.
The site's real job is recruiting
Brokers often build their website for buyers and sellers. That is a reasonable instinct and mostly wrong. Consumers searching for property go where the inventory is, which is the big portals, and they arrive at your agents through those portals or through referral. Your site rarely wins that fight and does not need to.
The audience that does read your site carefully is agents deciding where to hang their licence. They look at commission structure, training, what technology you provide, what the office actually feels like, and how your existing agents are presented. An agent is choosing an employer's shop window, and unlike a home buyer they will read every word.
- Say what you provide plainly. Marketing support, lead routing, a mailbox, an agent page, coaching. Vagueness reads as nothing.
- Make agent pages good. A recruit judges how you will present them by how you present the people already there.
- Put a real name and phone number on the careers page. Agents call rather than fill in forms.
- Keep the roster current. A departed agent still listed tells a visiting recruit exactly how organised the office is.
This reframing is useful because it lowers the pressure on your hosting. A recruiting site is a modest number of pages of text and photographs. It is not a portal, and you do not need to buy like one.
We handle the departure checklist for you
Mailbox handover, the agent page redirect, logins removed, listings reassigned. AldoMedia has done this for Western New York offices since 1999, and we will say so plainly if your current setup already covers it.
IDX at brokerage scale
Search on your own site usually comes from an IDX feed, and at brokerage scale it is the one part of the setup that can genuinely justify spending more. Two things change once you are pulling in a whole market's inventory rather than a handful of your own listings.
First, weight. A search page that builds thousands of property records, each with photographs, does far more work per visit than the rest of your site put together. If your site is slow, this is where to look before you look at your plan. Caching and letting the provider host the heavy search often does more than any upgrade.
Second, the terms. Your access to that data comes with rules from your MLS about display, attribution, refresh frequency and what happens when you stop being a member. Those rules vary by market and they do change, so treat anything you read online, including this, as a prompt to ask rather than an answer. Confirm the specifics with your MLS and your own adviser before you build around them.
Two questions worth asking any IDX vendor before you sign: does the search live on your domain or theirs, and if you leave, do the property pages you have accumulated go away. The answers decide how much of that traffic was ever yours.
The practical setup for most brokerages is ordinary hosting for the site you control, with search handled by the IDX provider. It keeps your own pages fast and keeps the licensing question inside a contract that somebody else maintains.
Who should not be reading this page
Individual agents. If you are one agent with your own website, almost everything above is a problem you do not have, and following it will cost you money for nothing.
You are not administering anyone else's mailbox. Nobody is going to leave your firm and take a page with them. You do not have a roster to keep current or a recruiting audience to write for. Your site is a handful of pages, your own listings, your own contact details, and an entry shared plan covers it comfortably. The real estate agents page on this site is the right one for that, and it is a shorter read.
- You do not need an administered mail platform for one mailbox.
- You do not need a bigger plan because you added listings. Property pages are text and photographs.
- You do not need managed hosting for a site that has no logins and takes no payments.
- You probably do need your own domain rather than a brokerage subdomain, so your address survives a move between firms.
The dividing line is not how many houses you sell. It is whether you are responsible for accounts that belong to other people. The moment you are, the questions on this page start to matter, and until then they do not.
One thing that applies to both: keep working backups of the site. A brokerage site holds years of agent bios, area pages and content nobody has the original files for any more.
How AldoMedia helps
AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999, and brokerage sites where nobody can get into a departed agent's mailbox are familiar work. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, and we will tell you when what you are already paying for is the right thing.
If you are taking over a site somebody else built, or moving an office onto administered mail, the order of operations matters more than the products do. See taking over a website, call 716-771-2536, or tell us how many agents you have and what they are on now.
Common questions
Brokerage website questions
An agent left and we cannot get into their brokerage mailbox. What now?
It depends on how the account was created. If it sits under a brokerage administrator account, someone in your office can reset the password today and set a forward so nothing is lost. If the agent created it themselves and recovery points at their personal phone, you are relying on their goodwill. Either way, fix the setup for everyone else this week. Create mailboxes from the brokerage administrator account and set recovery to an office phone and address.
Should we delete an agent's page when they leave?
Redirect it rather than delete it. Those pages get linked from directories, old email signatures and search results, so deleting sends people to a dead end and throws away the search value. Pointing the old address at your agent directory keeps the link working and keeps the visitor on your site. Just be quick about it, because an agent page left up is a competitor's advert on your domain.
Do agents need mailboxes at our domain, or can they use their own?
Both are defensible and the choice is yours. What causes trouble is doing it inconsistently. If you provide the address, provide it properly under a brokerage administrator account. If you do not, say so clearly, because agents who go and set something up themselves at a lookalike domain create a problem you will only find out about later.
Our IDX search is slow. Do we need a bigger hosting plan?
Usually not. A search page that builds thousands of property records with photographs does more work than the rest of your site combined, and that weight follows you onto a bigger plan. Look at caching first, and at whether the heavy search can live with the IDX provider rather than on your own server. Upgrade only once you know the plan is genuinely the limit.
Is our brokerage site supposed to bring in buyers?
Rarely, and that is fine. Consumers searching for property go where the inventory is, which is the big portals. The audience that reads a brokerage site closely is agents deciding where to hang their licence, so write it for them: what you provide, how you present the people already there, and a real name and phone number on the careers page.
What should we ask an IDX vendor before signing?
Whether the search lives on your domain or theirs, and what happens to the property pages you accumulate if you leave. Also confirm the display and attribution rules that come with your MLS membership, because they vary by market and they change. Treat general guidance as a prompt to ask, and check the specifics with your MLS and your own adviser.
Related
Email Migration
Moving an office onto a properly administered mail platform without losing anyone's mail on the way.
How an email move worksTaking Over a Website
What to collect when the brokerage site was built by someone who is no longer answering the phone.
Read the handover guideEvery trade we cover is listed on hosting by industry.
Hero image: Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.
Make sure the accounts are actually yours
Tell us how many agents you have and what their mailboxes run on, and we will tell you whether the brokerage really controls them. If it already does, 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.