Oregon Real Estate Advertising Rules — the Team Name Ban Is Suspended Until July 2027
Oregon rewrote this area twice in nine months. Its rule names email, requires the registered business name to be “immediately noticeable”, and — the part most likely to catch you out — its team-name ban on “realty” and “real estate” is currently suspended, returning on 1 July 2027.
Step by step
Use one of three permitted forms of your name
OAR 863-015-0125(3): advertising that includes your name must use either (a) your licensed name; (b) a common derivative of your licensed first name plus your licensed last name; or (c) an alternative name registered with the Agency — and if you use option (c), your licence number as well.
Include the registered business name, immediately noticeable
§ 0125(4): “The registered business name, as registered with the Agency, shall be immediately noticeable in all advertising.” The Agency’s gloss: a consumer can see it “without having to search for it.”
Do not size anything — there is no numeric standard
“Immediately noticeable” is the whole test. There is no font, point-size, percentage or prominence standard anywhere in the Agency’s rules. (Oregon does have a 10-point bold rule — but it belongs to residential property wholesaler disclosures, not licensee advertising.)
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§ 0125(2)(c): advertising shall not state or imply that the licensee “is a managing principal broker or is responsible for operating the registered business” if they are not. Note “managing principal broker” is a role, not a licence class.
Do not imply expertise you do not hold
§ 0125(2)(d): advertising shall not state or imply that the licensee “is qualified or has a level of expertise other than as currently maintained”.
Licence number: only if you use a registered alternative name
Oregon does not join California and Nevada as a general licence-number state. But it is not a clean “no” either — under option (c) above, advertising under a registered alternative name requires the licence number alongside it.
Get the disclosures into your first email
§ 0125(5)(d) exempts a later email or text from the disclosure requirements “if the licensee’s initial communication contained the information required”. So the first message to a new contact is the one that matters — and a standing signature satisfies it every time without tracking who you have written to.
The team-name ban is suspended right now
This is the finding most likely to make an Oregon compliance page wrong today.
HB 3137 (2025) created ORS 696.370 effective 1 January 2026, including a subsection providing that a team name “may not include the terms ‘realty’ or ‘real estate’ and may not be identical to the registered business name.”
Then SB 1513 (2026), effective 31 March 2026 under an emergency clause, deleted that subsection and re-enacted it as a new subsection — with its own operative date of 1 July 2027.
Net effect: there is no statutory Oregon team-name restriction in force today. It was live for roughly two months — from 1 January 2026 until the emergency clause took effect on passage in early March — and it returns on 1 July 2027. The Agency has published a notice telling licensees to remove those terms by that date — not now.
So a page telling Oregon teams they must drop “Realty” today is wrong; and a page telling them the terms are permanently fine is also wrong. There is a deadline, and it is 1 July 2027.
Two broken cross-references in the adopted rules
Oregon’s recent rewrite left visible seams, and they matter if you try to follow the citations.
- OAR 863-015-0142 does not exist. The team-advertising provision at § 0125(7) conditions team advertising on compliance with “OAR 863-015-0142 Real Estate Teams” — a rule that was proposed and then dropped. It appeared in the August 2025 notice of proposed rulemaking with full text, and by the time the permanent order was filed that October it was gone: the order contains only two adoptions, and 0142 is not one of them. The sentence citing it in § 0125(7) is byte-identical between the proposed and adopted versions — the Agency removed the rule and never fixed the reference to it. Cite ORS 696.370 and OAR 863-015-0143 instead.
- The email exemption is circular. § 0125(5)(d) exempts a later email “if the licensee’s initial communication contained the information required by subsection (a)” — but subsection (a) merely says advertising must comply with the rest of the rule; it specifies no information. The evident target is subsection (b), which is what the parallel property-manager rule cross-references. No Agency interpretation exists, so treat the conservative reading — name and registered business name in the initial email — as the safe one rather than as settled law.
Those are not isolated slips. The same October 2025 order shipped six literal “XXXX” placeholders into adopted rule text — one of them in the property-manager advertising rule, which requires an alternative name registered “per OAR 863-024-XXXX”. All six were present in the proposal and none was filled in before adoption. They remain the operative text today.
The Agency's own guidance invents a rule
Oregon is the tenth state in this series where the regulator’s published guidance does not match its own rules.
An Agency advertising tip, still live and uncorrected, tells licensees that only “Team” or “Group” may be used as descriptors, and that “and Associates” or “and Company” do not comply — citing OAR 863-015-0125.
No such whitelist exists in the rule — not in the current text, not in the pre-2026 text. Nor would the dropped rule have supported it: the proposed 0142 said a team name “may include the terms ‘team’ or ‘group’”, which is permissive, not exclusive. The whitelist has never had a basis in any Oregon rule, adopted or proposed.
The same page states that all team members must share the same principal broker; since 1 January 2026 the statute refers to the same managing principal broker.
The Agency has said all this in writing
Unusually for this series, the regulator has acknowledged the position rather than leaving it to be pieced together. Its March 2026 notice states that “the Agency decided not to include the prohibition in its administrative rules. While the language was stricken from rule, the restriction remained in statute.”
The same notice adds something practical: the Agency “decided to wait until the end of the 2026 legislative session before acting on complaints about team names.” Read alongside the Commissioner’s observation that the Agency “is not staffed to actively police websites”, that is a candid account of where enforcement currently sits.
Email is named — twice
No inference needed. § 0125(1)(e) defines the covered media as “Electronic media, including but not limited to multiple listing services, websites, email, social media, mobile apps, and other online marketing.” And § 0125(5)(d) addresses email again in the exemption above.
Oregon does not use the phrase “email signature” — only Colorado and Tennessee do — but email is captured squarely as a medium.
What Oregon does not regulate
- “REALTOR®” appears nowhere in Oregon’s real estate statutes. In the Agency’s rules it appears only in procedural provisions listing Realtor associations among bodies notified of rulemaking. It is a NAR membership mark governed by contract, not Oregon law.
- “Agent” is permitted. It is not a licence class — Oregon licenses brokers, principal brokers, property managers and timeshare sales agents — but it is a defined statutory term, and nothing prohibits using it, subject to the truthfulness and no-overstated-expertise rules.
- “Salesperson” is not an Oregon licence class and survives only in reciprocity language.
- No rule governs designations such as GRI, CRS or ABR beyond § 0125(2)(d).
Where to check — and where not to
Cornell and public.law are both stale for Oregon, serving the pre-2026 text — including a repealed subsection and the entire old team provision. A researcher using either would describe a rule that was replaced on 1 January 2026. Use the Secretary of State’s own rules database.
Note too that the online statutes are the 2025 Edition and carry Oregon’s own warning that sections were amended in the 2026 session — the SB 1513 suspension is not yet compiled into them.
One further point of context: the Commissioner noted in late 2025 that the Agency “is not staffed to actively police websites”, and renewal now requires licensees to list team advertising URLs and self-attest that the registered business name requirement is met. Enforcement is shifting toward self-certification rather than sweeps.
Sources: OAR 863-015-0125 (Advertising, as amended by REA 4-2025, eff. 1 Jan. 2026), 863-015-0143 (Real Estate Team Disclosure, adopted eff. 1 Jan. 2026), 863-014-0067, 863-025-0125 (property managers); ORS 696.010(15), 696.022(1), 696.370 (created by HB 3137, 2025 Or Laws ch. 389, eff. 1 Jan. 2026; team-name subsection deleted and re-enacted by SB 1513, 2026 Or Laws ch. 76, eff. 31 Mar. 2026, operative 1 July 2027), 696.800(1); Oregon Real Estate Agency newsroom notices; NAR 2026 Code of Ethics. Verified against the Oregon Secretary of State's administrative rules database and the Legislature's published session laws, September 2026.
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Registered business name, immediately noticeable
Oregon asks for your name in one of three permitted forms and the registered business name where a consumer will see it without looking. Autograph builds that once, installs it into Apple Mail in one click, and sets up your iPhone by QR code so the first email always carries it.
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Can an Oregon team name include “Realty” right now?
Yes — temporarily. The statutory ban on “realty” and “real estate” in team names was deleted effective 31 March 2026 and re-enacted with an operative date of 1 July 2027. So there is no restriction in force today, and there will be one from that date. The Agency’s own notice tells licensees to remove those terms by 1 July 2027.
Does Oregon require my license number in advertising?
Only in one situation. Oregon gives three permitted forms of your name, and the third — an alternative name registered with the Agency — must be accompanied by your licence number. If you advertise under your licensed name or a common derivative of it, no number is required.
What does “immediately noticeable” mean?
The Agency’s gloss is that a consumer can see it “without having to search for it.” There is no font size, percentage or prominence ratio anywhere in the rules — the 10-point bold requirement people sometimes cite belongs to residential property wholesaler disclosures, not licensee advertising.
Do I need the disclosures in every email?
The rule exempts later emails and texts where the initial communication carried the required information. The cross-reference in that exemption is defective — it points at a subsection that specifies nothing — and no Agency interpretation exists. A standing signature satisfies the requirement on every message, which sidesteps the ambiguity entirely.
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