Mississippi Real Estate Advertising Rules — Contact Details Alone Are Not Compliance

Mississippi has the single most email-signature-relevant sentence in this whole comparison, and almost nobody quotes it: an advertisement may not run where only a post office box, telephone number, e-mail address or street address appears. A signature reduced to contact details is not a compliant signature.

Step by step

Email is named twice, and one of those is the important one

Rule 3.3(A) defines an advertisement to encompass “any correspondence, mailing, newsletter, brochure, business card… and electronic media to include e-mails, text messaging, public blogs, social media-networking websites, and/or internet displays”. That settles whether your signature is advertising: it is.

The second mention is the one that changes what you write. Rule 3.3(D) lists “e-mail address” among the things an advertisement may not consist of only. Most states’ blind-ad rules name a post office box and a telephone number; Mississippi added the email address, and in doing so wrote the rule that speaks most directly to a signature block.

Two things that are true of Mississippi and of none of its neighbours

We tested the obvious candidates first and they fail. The broker’s phone number is also required in Louisiana and Tennessee. The equal-or-larger print rule is also in Alabama and Tennessee. On the headline columns Mississippi is close to identical to Tennessee, and any guide selling those as Mississippi-specific is wrong about the neighbours.

What is genuinely distinctive, verified by reading each neighbour’s rulebook rather than by failing to find something:

• The blind-ad rule that names an e-mail address. No equivalent in Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas or Tennessee. Tennessee’s post-office-box rule is about where your business is, not what an advertisement contains.
• Inactive licensees are still bound. Tennessee’s advertising chapter uses the word “inactive” zero times. Louisiana has eleven references to inactive status, none of them about advertising. Alabama and Arkansas impose no such duty.

The regulator publishes almost nothing on advertising

There is no contradiction between Mississippi’s guidance and its rule, for the simple reason that there is barely any guidance. The Commission’s opinions page reads “Commission orders and opinions will be provided as they become available” and is otherwise empty. Its newsletter was dormant until a 2026 relaunch, and none of the issues published since mentions advertising.

One hygiene problem is worth knowing about: the Commission hosts three editions of its rulebook at once. The 2023 and 2025 editions match the official code exactly. The 2019 edition drops the words “a Team Member” from the size rule — a regulator-hosted misquote of its own adopted rule. The effect is cosmetic, since a team member is a licensee anyway, but it tells you which copy to trust.

Mississippi has AI guidance, and it deliberately imposes nothing

The Commission adopted AI guidelines in June 2026, by unanimous motion. They warn about AI-generated “marketing text (example: listing descriptions)” and AI photo editing — and they impose no disclosure duty. The document says on its face that it does not constitute Commission rules, legal advice or official policy.

That is a meaningful contrast with Wisconsin, whose AI-disclosure duty becomes binding on 1 January 2027, and with Oklahoma’s extension of broker responsibility to generative tools.

What the internet gets wrong about Mississippi

• “Mississippi requires your licence number.” False. The phrase “license number” appears nowhere in the Commission’s rules or in the licence law. The team registration form collects one from every member — but that is a filing obligation, not a display one.
• The appraiser trap. A different Mississippi board — appraisers — does require a number “adjacent to their signature”. Wrong board, and it governs an appraisal report, not advertising.
• “MREC is changing the advertising rules.” Currently circulating and false. A state association page with that headline is still indexed but now 404s — and it described the 2017 proposal that became the current rule in 2018. The genuine 2026 rewrite pointedly leaves Rule 3.3 alone.
• “Responsible broker”. Secondary write-ups still use it. Since 2018 the advertising rule says Principal Broker. One such page also drops “e-mail address” from the blind-ad list — the single most relevant word on this page.
• The rules mirror is accurate but undatable. Its text of Rule 3.3 is right, including the subsection letters. It says “No prior version found” and gives no effective date, so nothing on it tells you the rule dates from 1 July 2018 or that a rewrite is pending which spares it.

No expiry — confirmed, not merely unfound

Mississippi has no five-year-review or automatic-expiry mechanism for administrative rules. The Secretary of State’s own procedural rules contain no sunset, periodic-review or readoption provision; the only time limit applies to emergency rules. Rules sit in the code until amended or repealed. There is nothing here like Kentucky’s expiry date or Iowa’s auto-rescission.