What Does Florida Require on Your Business Cards, Signs, and Social Media?

Updated August 2026 · Reviewed by Adams, Cameron & Co.

New agents tend to treat marketing materials as a design decision and discover the rules afterwards. It is a short set of requirements, it is genuinely enforceable, and the place it gets broken first is almost never a business card. It is a social media profile.

The rule that governs all of it

Rule 61J2-10.025 of the Florida Administrative Code covers advertising by licensees. Two general obligations run through the whole thing. All advertising must be done in a manner in which reasonable people would know they are dealing with a real estate licensee, and no advertisement placed by a licensee may be fraudulent, false, deceptive or misleading.

Those are not decorative. They are the provisions that catch things a checklist would miss, which is the point of writing them broadly.

What has to appear

The licensed name of the brokerage firm has to be in the advertisement. Licensed name means the full name the firm is registered under with the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, not a shortened version, not a nickname the office uses internally, and not a logo alone. Get the exact registered name from your broker in writing before you order anything, because this is the detail that turns a whole print run into waste.

If your own name appears, your last name has to appear as it is registered with the Commission. Agents who go by a shortened first name or a preferred name should check how their record actually reads rather than assuming.

The online requirement, which is where people slip

For advertising on the internet, the rule is more specific than most agents realize. The brokerage firm name has to be placed adjacent to, immediately above, or immediately below the point of contact information.

Point of contact information is defined broadly: any means by which to reach the brokerage or the individual licensee, including mailing addresses, physical street addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers and fax numbers. So the moment you publish a way to reach you, the brokerage name has to travel with it, positioned near it rather than buried somewhere else on the page.

This is why a social profile is the usual first violation. A bio with a phone number, a booking link or an email address and no brokerage name anywhere near it is squarely the situation this provision describes. The fix costs nothing and takes a minute, which is what makes it worth doing today rather than after someone points it out. The same logic applies to the phone number specifically, covered in whether you need a local area code as a real estate agent.

Team and group names, a separate rule with a word list

If you work under a team or group name, Rule 61J2-10.026 applies on top of everything above, and it is more prescriptive than agents expect.

A team or group name may not include terms that suggest it is a separate brokerage entity. The prohibited terms include agency, associates, brokerage, company, corporation, LLC, partnership, real estate and realty, along with similar words carrying the same implication. This is where the instinct to invent something that sounds established goes wrong: the natural-sounding name a new team wants to use is frequently built from exactly these words.

Two further requirements. The team or group name may not appear in larger print than the name of the registered brokerage, so the visual hierarchy people naturally design, team name large, brokerage name small at the bottom, is backwards. And the advertising has to make clear that consumers are dealing with a team or group rather than with a separate firm. A designated licensee is responsible for the team’s compliance.

Where this actually bites in practice

Run through the surfaces you are about to create, because the requirement attaches to each of them independently: business cards, yard signs and riders, vehicle magnets, listing flyers, your social profiles and posts that carry contact details, any personal website or landing page, and your email signature.

The two failure patterns are consistent. The first is contact details published without the brokerage name beside them, which is the online provision. The second is a team or personal brand designed to look like a company, which is the team-name rule. Both come from the same instinct, which is wanting to look independent and established. In Florida the licensing structure does not allow that, because you are advertising on behalf of a brokerage, and the rules exist so consumers can tell who they are actually dealing with.

What to do before you print or publish anything

Ask your broker for the firm’s exact licensed name in writing and use that string verbatim. Ask whether the brokerage has approved templates for cards, signage and social profiles, because most established firms do and using them removes the question entirely. Ask who reviews marketing materials before they go out, and use that person.

That last one is worth weighing when you choose where to hang your license. A firm with a compliance review process, and a manager you can send a draft to without it becoming a conversation about your production, is a genuine protection during the period when you are least equipped to catch your own mistakes. It belongs in the same list as everything else in the questions to ask a brokerage before joining.

The honest bottom line

This is a small, learnable set of requirements that carries real consequences and costs nothing to comply with if you check first. The brokerage’s licensed name goes with your contact information, your registered last name goes with your personal name, your team name cannot pretend to be a firm, and nothing you publish can mislead. Confirm the exact wording once, build your materials on it, and this stops being something you think about.

None of this is legal advice, and rules are amended. Confirm current requirements with your broker or directly with the Department before you rely on any summary, including this one.

Does this apply to a personal account?

The common boundary question, and the honest answer is that it depends on what the account is doing rather than on what you call it. The rule attaches to advertising, meaning the promotion of real estate services or property. A personal account that never touches your work is not advertising.

The line moves the moment that account does any of the following: names you as an agent and carries a way to contact you, posts about a listing, or promotes your services even in passing. At that point it is advertising regardless of the label on it, and the requirements attach. Since most agents do exactly this on the account they already had, the practical answer for nearly everyone is to treat any account where you present yourself as an agent as advertising, and set it up correctly once rather than policing it post by post.

Who is actually responsible

Worth understanding, because it explains why brokerages care about this more than you might expect. Your advertising is done on behalf of the brokerage, and the broker carries responsibility for how licensees under that firm advertise. Your business card is not a personal document with the firm’s name on it as a courtesy. It is the firm’s advertising with your name on it.

That is why an established office has templates, a review step and someone whose job includes checking this. Firms that skip it are not being relaxed with you, they are carrying a risk they have not thought about, and so are you.

What happens to all of it when you switch brokerages

This is the part almost nobody plans for, and it arrives fast. The moment your license moves, every surface carrying the old firm’s licensed name is wrong: cards, sign riders, vehicle magnets, your email signature, your social profiles, any personal site, and any listing marketing still circulating.

Two practical consequences follow. Do not order print in volume to save money per unit, because unused stock is the most common casualty of a move that made sense for every other reason. And when you do move, treat the profile and signature updates as same-day work rather than something to get to, since those are the surfaces the public actually sees and the ones that are wrong the longest. The related question of what else does and does not travel with you is covered in how portable your book of business is when you switch brokerages.

What is your next step?

If you are still working through the licensing sequence, our Florida real estate license guide covers the whole path, and how agents use social media without wasting time on it covers what to actually post once your profile is compliant. Adams, Cameron & Co. has been the area’s largest brokerage since 1963, with non-competing managers who will review your materials without it turning into a conversation about your numbers. Start a conversation with us.