West Virginia Real Estate Advertising Rules — the Half-Size Rule, and Which Rule Your Signature Falls Under
West Virginia is the rare state that answers with a fraction: the brokerage block must be at least half the size of your name. Which means your own name may lawfully run up to twice the size of your brokerage’s — the opposite of what most agents assume. And whether that rule touches your signature at all depends on what the signature is doing.
§174-1-17.1 is headed “Advertising of property or specific services” and carries the long list — company name, responsible broker’s name, the literal word “Broker”, a physical office address, a phone number, and the half-size rule.
§174-1-17.3 covers advertising that is not for a specific property or service, and asks for far less: “the licensee name, company name, and contact information”.
An ordinary signature block sits under 17.3. The moment it markets a listing or a specific service, 17.1 bites in full.
Step by step
Decide which rule your signature is under
If the signature simply identifies you at the foot of your email, it is advertising that is not for a specific property or service, and §17.3 governs. If it carries a listing, a property link, a “just sold” line or a specific service offer, you are in §17.1 and everything below applies. Get this wrong in the cautious direction and you have simply written a fuller signature than you needed.
For a plain signature: three things
§17.3 in full: “Advertising which is not for a specific property or service must include the licensee name, company name, and contact information.” Note what is not here — the responsible broker’s name, the word “Broker”, and the physical office address are all requirements of 17.1, not 17.3.
If it markets a property or service: five things
§17.1: the company name, the name of the responsible broker, the term “Broker”, the physical address of a licensed office location, and a phone number. Read that phone requirement carefully — it says “a phone number”, unqualified. An earlier version said “the phone number of record”; those words were removed.
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§17.1: the company name, responsible broker’s name and the term “Broker” “shall be displayed no less than half the size of the names of the associate broker(s), salesperson(s), or team name”. This is a floor on the brokerage, not a ceiling on you — so West Virginia is one of the few states where your own name may legitimately be the larger of the two, by up to a factor of two.
Use the exact words the rule asks for
Three literal strings are compelled. “Broker” alongside the responsible broker’s name. “Associate Broker” or “Salesperson” to identify any licensee named. And — unusually — “Non-Licensed” beside the name of any team member who does not hold a current valid licence. Also: your company name must be the trade name as it appears on the broker’s licence, and West Virginia does not require a franchise legend.
Leave the licence number out
“License number” appears zero times in the entire rule and zero times in the Real Estate License Act. The only licence-number duty in West Virginia is a filing one — the Commission’s FAQ asks you to include it when you email a change of address. That is not a display requirement. West Virginia wants a physical office address and no licence number, which is the inverse of the pattern most people expect.
The Commission’s own memo contradicts its own rule — three ways
The Commission still publishes a Teams memorandum dated July 2023 on its Memos page. We confirmed it is live and still linked. It tells licensees three things, and the rule now in force supports none of them.
| The memo says | The rule says |
|---|---|
| Brokerage name in “equal prominence” with the team and salesperson names | “No less than half the size”. The memo overstates the requirement. |
| A team name must include “group”, “team” or a comparable term | Nothing. There is no team-naming requirement anywhere in the rule. |
| A team name must not use “realty”, “associates” or “company” | Nothing. No prohibited-words rule exists. |
The memo also cites the team definition as “§174-1-2.10”. That was its number in the 2021 version; it has been 2.9 since 2024. And the wording the memo quotes is the 2021 wording, not the current one.
Two mouse clicks — a rare number to find in a rule
§17.4: the information required by 17.1 and 17.2 “must appear on the home page or the screen that is first seen by the viewer. This information must be accessible with no more than two mouse clicks when advertising on social media.”
Two things stand out. It is an explicit click budget, where most states either say nothing or insist on the first screen. And it is two, not one. We checked five surrounding states from their own codes: only Maryland states a click number at all — “a single click”, and only where the medium is capped at 280 characters. Kentucky and Ohio require a “direct link” without saying how deep.
A fraction, where the neighbours use adjectives
The half-size rule is the other genuinely unusual piece of drafting. Of Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland, only two impose a type-size relationship at all — Pennsylvania requires equal size, and Kentucky caps the licensee’s name at no larger than the brokerage’s. Neither is expressed as a fraction. Ohio uses “equal prominence”, Maryland “meaningful and conspicuous”, and Virginia only “clear, legible, and conspicuous”. None of the five requires a licence number.
Email is not named — and the internet rule does not fit email
The definition catches email by its tail: advertising means “print media, yard signs, billboards, radio, television, internet, social media, or any other advertising medium”. Email is not named. The word appears once in the whole rule, and it is about telling the Commission your email address of record.
The rule expires in 2030 — and the Legislature edited it on the way in
The rule states its own end: “This rule shall terminate and have no further force or effect upon August 1, 2030.”
West Virginia legislative rules also need the Legislature’s authorisation to take effect, and here the Legislature used it. The authorising act approved the rule “with the following amendment: On page 13, by striking out the entirety of subsection 16.4” — a proposed written-agency-agreement mandate. It never took effect. But it still sits, underlined as new text, in the September 2025 filing. Anyone quoting that filing would report a requirement that does not exist.
One more oddity for anyone tracing the authority: the rulemaking grant in the statute lists fourteen subjects and advertising is not one of them. Every content requirement above is regulatory only — there is no advertising statute behind it, and so no law-versus-regulation conflict to worry about.
What the internet gets wrong about West Virginia
- “Equal prominence” / “the brokerage name must be as large as yours.” It was the rule, for team advertising only, until May 2025. The standard is now half the size, and it applies to all advertising rather than just teams. The Commission’s own memo is the main reason this one persists.
- “Team names must contain ‘team’ or ‘group’ and cannot use ‘realty’.” This exists only in that memo. The rule contains no team-naming provision at all.
- “The brokerage’s phone number as declared on its licence must appear.” The rule says “a phone number”. The “of record” qualifier was removed in 2021.
- “Business cards must include the responsible broker’s name.” True until 2021. Since then §17.3 asks only for the licensee name, company name and contact information.
- Citing “§174-1-17” for anything before mid-2018 is wrong. Advertising used to be §174-1-9; §17 was “Commingling Defined”. The older rule also allowed the term “Realtor” in place of “Broker”, which the current rule does not.
- The Commission’s own pages are unreliable here. Its news post about the new supervision rule states an effective date two months later than the rule’s own text. Its Law Book is titled for one date and contains the text of another. Most of the document links on its Law Book page are dead. The working route is its main Law page, which links correctly to the official text.
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.
Half the size, and the right words
West Virginia asks for a brokerage block at least half the size of your name, the literal term “Broker”, and correct labels for everyone named — proportions and wording a phone-typed signature quietly loses. Autograph builds it once and installs it into Apple Mail in one click.
Download Autograph free See the templatesCommon questions
Does West Virginia require my licence number in my email signature?
No. The phrase “license number” appears nowhere in the advertising rule and nowhere in the Real Estate License Act. The only place the Commission asks for your licence number is when you email it a change of address — a filing, not a display. West Virginia does require a physical office address in property advertising, which is the requirement people tend to confuse it with.
What has to be in an ordinary West Virginia email signature?
If the signature is not marketing a specific property or service, §174-1-17.3 asks for three things: your licensee name, your company name, and contact information. The longer list — the responsible broker’s name, the literal word “Broker”, a physical office address and a phone number — belongs to §17.1, which covers advertising of property or specific services. Add a listing to your signature and you move into §17.1.
Can my name be bigger than my brokerage's?
Yes, up to twice as big. West Virginia sets a floor rather than a ceiling: the company name, the responsible broker’s name and the term “Broker” must be “no less than half the size” of your name or your team’s. That makes it one of the more permissive states on this point — and it is the opposite of what the Commission’s own published Teams memo says.
Does my team name have to include the word “team”?
Not under the rule. The Commission’s July 2023 Teams memo says a team name must include “group”, “team” or a comparable term and must not use “realty”, “associates” or “company” — but no such requirement appears anywhere in the legislative rule, which imposes labelling duties rather than naming ones. The memo is still published and has never been rescinded, so following it is the cautious course; just know that it is not what the rule says.
Is my email signature caught by the “two mouse clicks” rule?
Probably not, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. That rule sits in §17.4, headed “Internet advertising”, and its tests are written for web pages and social platforms — “the screen that is first seen by the viewer” and two clicks on social media. Neither maps onto an email signature, and the Commission has published nothing resolving it. The safe course is to put the required information in the signature itself rather than behind a link.
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