Delaware Real Estate Advertising Rules — Which Rule Applies Depends on Your Team
Delaware has a size rule stricter than any of its neighbours — the brokerage name must be in greater size than yours, where Pennsylvania demands exactly equal and Maryland has no rule at all. But it does not reach a solo agent’s signature. It reaches yours the moment you add a team name.
8.6.5.5 — personal promotion. Brokerage name plus office phone. No size rule.
8.6.5.4 — team advertising. Brokerage name adjacent to the team name and in greater size and visibility. Not limited to property ads.
8.6.5.3 — advertising a listed property. The full treatment, including the greater-size rule.
The most common error written about Delaware is applying the size rule to every signature. It does not apply to a solo agent’s personal promotion.
Step by step
Include the complete registered brokerage name
Rule 8.6.5.5: all advertisements for personal promotion must include “the complete Brokerage Organization name that has been registered with the Commission”. Not a logo, not a shortened form, not a d/b/a — the registered name in full.
Include the office phone number registered with the Commission
The same rule requires the “office phone number registered by the Broker with the Commission for that office location”. Delaware is unusual in requiring the broker’s phone in a purely self-promotional advertisement that mentions no property at all — and it must be the registered number for your office, not a general company line.
If a team name appears, the size rule switches on
Rule 8.6.5.4: “Team advertising shall prominently display the name of the supervising broker’s brokerage organization adjacent to the team name in greater size and visibility than the team name.” Both requirements — placement and proportion. Equal sizing does not comply, and this rule is not confined to property advertising the way the parallel rule is.
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Download freeUnlock Pro — one-time, no subscriptionName your team correctly
Rule 8.5.2.1: the word “team” or “group” or “associates” must be included in the team name. 8.5.2.2 bars terms suggesting a separate brokerage, “such as ‘Realty’, ‘Real Estate’, or ‘Realtors’”. Note a 2022 liberalisation almost nobody reports: “Company”, “Corporation”, “Corp.”, “Inc.”, “LLC”, “LP” and “LLP” were removed from the prohibited list.
Label every phone number you list
Rule 8.6.5.3 ends with a requirement that is now close to unique — though it was not until recently, see below: advertising “shall also contain language or abbreviations that clearly identify each phone number listed; examples include, but are not limited to: ‘Office’; ‘Home’; ‘Res.’; and ‘Cell’”. On a plain reading that sentence governs property advertising rather than personal promotion — but labelling your numbers costs nothing and removes the question.
Leave the licence number out
None is required — the phrase appears zero times in the entire chapter. There is a specific reason the myth persists here: Delaware once had a statute headed “Form and display of license”, and it was repealed in April 2019. Licence display in Delaware is now a physical-office duty, never an advertising one.
Email is named, and so is your jurisdiction of licensure
Rule 8.6.2 leaves no doubt: advertising includes “electronic media to include emails, text messaging, public blogs, podcasts, social media networking websites or internet displays”.
Rule 8.6.5.6 adds two things for internet advertising: the disclosures “may be made by link to a full disclosure” — more permissive than Maryland next door — and they must also include “the city and state in which the Broker’s main office is located and the Broker’s jurisdiction of licensure”.
Whether an email signature is “Internet electronic advertising” for that purpose is not settled. The term is undefined, and the rule’s cross-reference points only at the property-advertising rule — which on a plain reading leaves personal promotion outside it. No guidance or enforcement decision resolves it. We flag it rather than pretending otherwise.
Delaware against its neighbours: four different answers to one question
The size question splits the region four ways, and Delaware sits at the strict end:
- Delaware — the brokerage name in greater size and visibility.
- Pennsylvania — “The names and telephone numbers shall be of equal size.” Pennsylvania forbids what Delaware requires.
- New Jersey — “displayed in a more prominent manner”. The words “appear in larger print or” were deleted effective 20 January 2026, so New Jersey no longer has a type-size test at all.
- Maryland — no size, type-size or proportion rule anywhere; only the qualitative requirement that the connection with the broker be obvious.
Two more that are Delaware-only among the four, each verified against the neighbours’ own text: the buy-side advertising disclosure (a licensee advertising an offer to purchase must say they are a licensee), and the city, state and jurisdiction-of-licensure line for internet advertising.
There is one more genuine Delaware distinction, and it runs the opposite way from what you would expect. Delaware is the only one of the four where a self-promotion piece may lawfully show the agent’s name larger than the brokerage’s. Pennsylvania demands equal size, Maryland demands the brokerage be “meaningful and conspicuous”, and New Jersey demands the broker’s name be “more prominent” — all applied uniformly, personal promotion included. Delaware splits personal promotion off and applies no prominence standard to it at all.
On team names, Delaware compels a literal word where Maryland only describes one. Maryland’s provision is a definition — a group that designates itself “by a collective name such as team or group” — describing what makes a team, not mandating the label. Maryland instead regulates the connector, deeming a team name properly connected only if “of”, “from”, “with” or “at” is the only word between it and the brokerage name. Pennsylvania has no team provision in regulation at all.
The regulator’s only guidance is a pointer, and the pointer is broken
The Commission’s FAQ addresses advertising exactly once:
“Question: What are the rules and regulations governing Real Estate advertising? Answer: Please see 8.6 in Rules and Regulations.”
That is the whole of it — and the hyperlink behind “Rules and Regulations” no longer works. We fetched it: it returns a success code and an empty page shell that renders no regulation at all. Delaware migrated its regulations system in May 2025 and the old addresses stopped working; the Commission has not updated its own links, and the same dead link sits on its main page.
There is no newsletter, handbook, bulletin or policy statement on advertising. The Commission publishes no agendas or minutes at all through the state portal. So there is no rescinded memo hiding behind a dead link here — there is no memo.
A phase-in deadline that expired in 2022, still in the rule
Rule 8.7.2 begins “Effective six (6) months after the effective date of this Regulation” — a deadline that ran out around December 2022. The 2022 amendment deliberately stripped identical phase-in language out of two other subsections while adding it here, and the rulemaking currently pending carries it forward untouched.
What the internet gets wrong about Delaware
- “The brokerage name must be larger than yours in every Delaware advertisement.” Over-broad, and the most common error. The greater-size rule applies to property advertising and to team advertising. A solo agent’s personal-promotion signature needs the brokerage name and office phone with no size hierarchy.
- “Delaware team names cannot contain ‘Inc.’, ‘LLC’ or ‘Company’.” Those were removed from the prohibited list in 2022. Only terms suggesting a separate brokerage — “Realty”, “Real Estate”, “Realtors” — are the stated examples now.
- “Advertising must be in legible print and show the name of the company under whom the licensee is licensed.” Pre-2022 wording still circulating in search results. The current text says “the complete Brokerage Organization name that has been registered with the Commission”.
- “Delaware requires your licence number.” Zero occurrences in the chapter, and the licence-display statute was repealed in 2019.
- A six-month phase-in in the size rules. That language appeared in the 2022 proposal and was struck before adoption. Anyone quoting the proposal is quoting deleted text.
- The rules mirror is accurate here. We checked it against the authenticated official text on the two points where staleness would show, and it matches. Worth saying plainly rather than warning reflexively.
One thing to watch
A rulemaking has been pending since March 2026, and a Commission task force has met monthly since July 2025 on rule changes. We diffed the pending proposal against the codified text: the advertising and team rules are word-for-word unchanged — it concerns continuing education and style edits. But the chapter is under active institutional review, so treat this page as current-as-at rather than settled.
What does your state actually require?
Pick a state. Every answer is taken from the current rule text and checked against that state’s own statute and regulations — not from a template, and not from the regulator’s summary of its own rules, which is wrong in twenty-six jurisdictions.
The registered name, the registered number
Delaware wants the complete registered brokerage name and the office phone number registered with the Commission — and a strict size hierarchy the moment a team name appears. Autograph builds it once, installs it into Apple Mail in one click, and keeps the proportions on your iPhone.
Download Autograph free See the templatesCommon questions
Does the brokerage name have to be bigger than mine in my email signature?
It depends on whether a team name is in it. For a solo agent’s personal-promotion signature there is no size rule — you need the complete registered brokerage name and the registered office phone number, in any size. The moment a team name appears, the team rule applies: the brokerage name must sit adjacent to the team name and in greater size and visibility. Equal is not enough.
Does Delaware require my licence number?
No. The phrase appears nowhere in the chapter. The reason this myth is unusually persistent in Delaware is that the state used to have a statute headed “Form and display of license” — and it was repealed in April 2019. Licence display is now a physical-office requirement, not an advertising one.
What must a Delaware team name include?
The word “team”, “group” or “associates” — one of the three is compulsory. The name may not include terms suggesting a separate brokerage, such as “Realty”, “Real Estate” or “Realtors”. Worth knowing: “Company”, “Corp.”, “Inc.”, “LLC”, “LP” and “LLP” were on that banned list until 2022 and were removed, so older lists are wrong.
Do I have to label my phone numbers?
The rule requiring you to identify each number — “Office”, “Home”, “Res.”, “Cell” — sits inside the property-advertising subsection, so on a plain reading it does not reach a personal-promotion signature. It is also not the Delaware original it appears to be: New Jersey had a near-identical rule — same wording, same “Res.” example — and repealed it on 20 January 2026. Delaware is a survivor here rather than an inventor. Since labelling costs one word per line and removes any argument, we would label them.
I also work Pennsylvania. Can one signature satisfy both?
Not if you advertise as a team. Delaware requires the brokerage name in greater size than the team name; Pennsylvania requires the licensee’s and employing broker’s names and telephone numbers to be “of equal size”. Those are directly incompatible, so a team signature that complies in Delaware breaches Pennsylvania’s equal-size rule. Solo signatures are easier, since Delaware imposes no size rule on personal promotion.
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