June 2023
The guiding principle of the advertising rules is to be truthful and never misleading. Since much of advertising now exists online, take extra caution to ensure compliance. Unless the information is changed or removed – either by automation or manually – it may remain online indefinitely.
It is your responsibility to ensure all advertising under your control remains current. Here are some examples that are easy to overlook, but still fall under your obligations.
Residential and commercial listings for sale and lease
Many listings are posted on sites that have their own rules to ensure data is correct. For example, when a property is pending, sold, or otherwise changed on a local multiple listing service, that information is fed to other sites that get their data from the original source (such as brokerage sites and third-party aggregator sites).
However, any place in which you have posted the listing manually, like a personal website, blog, or social media app, may require you to change the status yourself. Continuing to show a listing as active when it has already been sold or leased is an example of misleading advertising and is considered a rule violation.
Brokerage or company affiliation
Once you are active in the business, you will appear online in a myriad of places. Keep a list of directories, referral groups, or professional websites in which you have created a profile. That way you can easily update all your information.
Control
For both listings and personal promotion, we realize that sometimes you will post information on a site you personally control, but it is then picked up by other sites you don't control. If you can demonstrate your good faith effort to correct or remove information on other websites or applications, you would not be considered in violation of advertising rules.
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