North Dakota Real Estate Advertising Rules — Contact Information, Not Just a Name
North Dakota asks for something none of its neighbours do: not just your brokerage’s name, but information on how the public can contact it. And the Commission’s own advertising Q&A answers the email question by quoting a definition the Commission itself deleted in 2022.
What is distinctive is subsection 3: advertising must include information on how the public can contact the brokerage. Minnesota, Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska all require the brokerage’s name and none of them requires contact details.
Step by step
Use the brokerage’s trade name as licensed with the Commission
§ 70-02-03-02.1(2): “Advertising must be done in the real estate brokerage agency’s trade name as licensed with the commission”. Not a shortened form and not a d/b/a — the registered string.
Add a way to reach the brokerage
§ (3): “Advertising must include information on how the public can contact the real estate brokerage agency.” The Commission’s own guidance accepts any of a street address, a phone number, an email address, or a website or QR code. What it does not accept is nothing at all — and this is the single duty that makes a North Dakota signature non-trivial.
Keep the trade name at least as large as your own name
§ (2) continues: the trade name “must be equal to or greater than, in size and visibility, the name of any salesperson, associate broker, or team on the advertising”. Equal complies. Note that this test also applies to your team name, not just your personal name.
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§ (4): advertising by a licensee “may include a licensee’s name and telephone number or other contact information, provided the real estate brokerage agency’s registered business name or trade name and contact information are also clearly included”. Permissive. The rule never requires your own name to appear — though the Commission’s Q&A says it does. See below.
Leave out the licence number and your own phone number
Neither is required. We checked all five real estate chapters of the administrative title: “license number” appears in none of them. The brokerage’s contact information is the requirement; your direct line is optional.
If you are selling your own property, use the exact words
§§ (6) and (7) compel literal strings: “Owner/Licensed Broker” or “Owner/Licensed Salesperson”. Unusually, this reaches inactive licensees too. South Dakota and Nebraska impose the same duty with no prescribed wording; Minnesota and Montana have no owner-disclosure provision in their advertising law at all.
The Commission’s Q&A quotes a definition it deleted
The only advertising guidance North Dakota publishes is a Q&A document, reviewed in October 2022 and re-uploaded in February 2024. It answers the email question directly:
“Do I need to have my company’s contact information on my text messages or my emails? Yes, as noted in question #4 advertising is defined as and includes telephone, internet, email, electronic bulletin board or other similar electronic carrier systems.”
Those words are not in the rule. They paraphrase the pre-July-2022 definition, which named “the internet, the world wide web, electronic mail, electronic bulletin board” — and which the Commission itself deleted in the 2022 amendment. The document reprints the current rule on its own first page and then answers using the old one.
The conclusion happens to be right — email is caught by the live definition’s “any manner and by any means of communication” — but it is reached by citing repealed text.
Two more divergences in the same document. It states that “the licensee’s name and brokerage MUST be identified in the initial post”, where the rule says a licensee’s name may be included. And it invents carve-outs for personal voicemail and branded apparel that the rule’s own definition does not support — while relying on that same definition, two questions earlier, to reach the opposite result for pens and pencils.
An expired deadline still sitting in the rule
Subsection 2 ends with a sentence that has done its job and stayed: “Discipline of licensees based on failure to meet this size and visibility requirement will be delayed until January 1, 2023.”
That date passed. The size rule is fully enforceable now. The transitional sentence remains codified anyway — and North Dakota has a statutory mechanism for stripping obsolete provisions without full rulemaking that has not been used here. We searched every administrative rules supplement from 2022 to 2026: the phrase “delayed until” appears nowhere else. It is not a drafting habit; it is a one-off left in the code.
Two rules that live only in the minutes
Two things a North Dakota licensee would want to know are not in the rule or the Q&A at all:
- The one-click allowance. The Commission agreed by consensus in October 2022 that “the brokerage contact information must be included in the initial post or within 1 click of the initial post”. That is recorded in meeting minutes and nowhere else. It has never been rescinded — we checked all twenty-eight sets of minutes from 2022 to 2026.
- A broker-to-broker enforcement gate. In November 2024 the Commission agreed that when one licensee reports another’s advertising, staff will direct the reporter to have their broker speak to the other broker first, and will only research the issue if that conversation leaves it unresolved. This appears nowhere in the published complaint and discipline procedures, which never mention advertising.
What the internet gets wrong about North Dakota
- “The rule expressly covers email.” It did until 30 June 2022. The media list was deleted. Email is still caught — by the general words, not by being named — and the vector for the confusion is the Commission’s own Q&A.
- “You must show the broker’s phone number.” No. The rule asks for “information on how the public can contact” the brokerage; an address, an email or a website satisfies it.
- “The size rule is not being enforced yet.” It is. That moratorium expired at the start of 2023.
- “You must include your licence number.” Verified absent from all five real estate chapters.
- The rules mirror is accurate here — a rare pass in this series. It serves the current text with the correct 2022 effective date. We say so because reflexively distrusting it would be wrong in North Dakota’s case.
One thing to watch
A statutory trap for your own entity
If you hold a licence through your own limited-liability company, note NDCC § 43-23-05.1(1)(c): such an organisation may hold a licence only if “the organization does not advertise or otherwise portray to the public the organization is a real estate broker or real estate brokerage firm”.
A signature that presents your own entity as though it were the brokerage breaches a statutory condition of that entity’s licence — a different and more serious problem than an advertising violation.
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.
Trade name, contact details, right size
North Dakota wants the brokerage’s licensed trade name, a way to reach the brokerage, and the name sized at least equal to yours. Autograph builds that once, installs it into Apple Mail in one click, and keeps the proportions identical on your iPhone.
Download Autograph free See the templatesCommon questions
What does North Dakota require in an agent’s email signature?
Two things: the brokerage agency’s trade name exactly as licensed with the Commission, and information on how the public can contact that brokerage — an address, phone number, email or website all qualify. The trade name must be at least equal in size and visibility to your own name or your team name. Your own name is optional under the rule.
Does North Dakota require my licence number?
No. We searched all five real estate chapters of the administrative code and the phrase does not appear in any of them. No telephone number of your own is required either — the contact-information duty attaches to the brokerage, not to you.
Is the size rule actually enforced?
Yes. The rule contains a sentence delaying discipline “until January 1, 2023”, and that date has passed, so the size and visibility requirement is fully enforceable. The transitional sentence simply remains in the codified text. It is worth flagging because that leftover wording still leads people to believe the rule is in a grace period.
Does the rule cover email?
Yes, but not because it says so. The pre-2022 rule expressly named electronic mail; the 2022 amendment deleted the whole list of media. Email is now caught by the general definition — “disseminated in any manner and by any means of communication”. The Commission’s own Q&A answers this question by quoting the deleted text, which is the right answer from the wrong source.
Is North Dakota’s size rule unusual?
No, and we would rather say so. Nebraska has essentially the same test in near-identical words, and adds an adjacency requirement North Dakota lacks. What is genuinely unusual about North Dakota is the contact-information duty in subsection 3 — none of Minnesota, Montana, South Dakota or Nebraska requires anything beyond the brokerage’s name.
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