Kansas Real Estate Advertising Rules — Email Is Named in the Rule, Then Left Out of It

Kansas puts a hard number in its advertising rule — your name may not run more than twice the font size of your broker’s. It also names email as advertising, and then omits email from the one requirement that would tell you where to put the broker’s name. The Commission’s guidance closes that gap; the rule text does not.

Step by step

Email is named as advertising — and then left out of the placement rule

The definition could not be clearer. K.A.R. 86-3-7(a) says advertising “shall include business cards, signs, insignias, letterheads, telephone or electronic mail, radio, television, newspaper and magazine advertisements, internet advertising, web sites, social media or social networking…”

Then comes the adjacency requirement. 86-3-7(b)(3) bars a name or team name that “is not adjacent to the supervising broker’s trade name or business name in any internet, web site, social media, or social networking advertisement”.

The Commission says adjacency applies everywhere

Its February 2021 newsletter answers the question directly, and states the rule without the medium limit:

“All advertising must include your broker’s trade/business name in a prominent and conspicuous manner and it must be adjacent to your name or team name” — citing K.S.A. 58-3086(b)(B) and K.A.R. 86-3-7(b)(3).

The regulation it cites applies adjacency only to internet, website, social media and social networking advertisements. Follow the guidance — put the brokerage name next to yours — but know that the gap is in the rule, not in your reading of it. The same newsletter confirms two other things worth having: Kansas does not accept a link in place of the disclosure, and the duty applies even when no property is in view.

The Commission also inverts its own font rule

Its July 2021 newsletter states that “the broker’s trade or business name must appear in a font size at least half the size of the name of the licensee or team”.

The regulation says a different thing about a different person. It binds the salesperson or associate broker, and it caps their name at not more than twice the broker’s. The arithmetic is roughly the same; the legal subject is not. And “more than two times larger” is genuinely ambiguous — twice the size, or three times? No Kansas source defines it, and the Commission’s restatement does not settle it.

The Commission’s only advertising handout never mentions email

Its “Guidelines on Advertising Changes” document discusses internet and social media. It contains no occurrence of mail, business card, letterhead, billboard or insignia — every one of which the regulation enumerates. Its worked examples are a yard sign and a social post. A Kansas licensee could read the Commission’s only dedicated advertising guidance and never learn that an email signature is regulated advertising at all.

The FAQ has the mirror-image problem. It states a comparative-prominence standard — the broker’s name must be prominent “in comparison to the licensee’s or team’s name” — and cites only the statute, which contains no comparison. The comparison lives in the regulation, which the FAQ never cites. Someone relying on the FAQ alone learns neither the 2× cap nor the adjacency rule.

Five calendar days

K.S.A. 58-3085(a): if your supervising broker’s licence expires, deactivates, or is suspended or revoked, all advertising under that broker’s name or trade name “must be removed or covered within five calendar days” — “including, but not limited to, signage”. An email signature carrying the brokerage name sits squarely inside “all advertising”. Almost nothing written about Kansas advertising mentions this statute.

A drafting quirk worth citing correctly

Subsection (b) of K.S.A. 58-3086 is lettered (A) (B) (C) where every sibling subsection uses (1) (2) (3). This is not a transcription error — it is in the enrolled text, and the Commission’s own FAQ cites “58-3086(b)(A)”. Cite it as 58-3086(b)(B), not 58-3086(b)(2).

The review cycle to diarise

Kansas runs a statutory five-year regulation review, and the Real Estate Commission sits in the 2026 cohort — report due 15 July 2026, then every fifth year, so 2031 next. The Commission’s minutes show the process ran and that its named revocation candidate was a different regulation, not the advertising rule. So 86-3-7 is not on the block — but it sits inside a live review, and a regulation may be maintained only if it “serves an identifiable public purpose” and is “not broader than is necessary”.

What the internet gets wrong about Kansas

• “Kansas requires a licence number in advertising.” False. No such duty exists in the statute article or the Commission’s regulations. The only licence-number requirement in the rulebook is a course-registration duty imposed on schools.
• “Kansas requires the broker’s telephone number.” False — and it is a Missouri rule that bleeds across the state line in Kansas City-area guidance.
• “K.A.R. 86-3-30 is the Kansas advertising rule.” Revoked in November 2016 — though the state’s own portal currently presents it as effective, which is how the claim stays alive.
• “The 2020 changes apply to all forms of advertising.” Overstated, by a REALTOR® association article from March 2020. The adjacency requirement applies only to internet, website, social media and social networking advertisements.
• A widely-cited state association refresher is from July 2018 — it pre-dates the 2020 amendment entirely and still ranks.
• Cornell is accurate here, unusually. It reproduces 86-3-7 correctly and attributes the 2020 amendment properly. We flag this because in most states of this series it is not.

What we could not settle

Whether the Commission actually enforces adjacency against email signatures. The rule text excludes email; the guidance asserts it for all advertising. No published order, opinion or FAQ resolves the conflict, and Kansas publishes disciplinary tables rather than reasoned orders — so there is no way to see how “adjacent”, “prominent” or “conspicuous” are applied in practice. The safe course is the guidance.