How to Switch Real Estate Brokerages (Step by Step)

The most expensive mistake agents make when changing brokerages is doing the right things in the wrong order. Specifically: telling the broker first.

At most brokerages, access to company email, the CRM, the transaction platform and the shared drive is cut the moment you announce. Not the day you leave. The moment you announce. Agents who resign on a Tuesday morning and plan to export their database that afternoon lose the database.

So the order is: line up the new brokerage, secure your data and marketing assets, tell your clients, tell your broker last.

The sequence, in order

Decide where you are going, quietly. Interview two or three brokerages. Get cap, split, fees and any team terms in writing.
Read your current independent contractor agreement end to end.
Secure your database, files and marketing assets, before anyone knows.
Map your pending transactions and listings and work out what happens to each.
Prepare the license transfer paperwork so it can be filed the same week.
Tell your clients, within the limits of your agreement and your state's rules.
Tell your broker. Last. In person if you can.
File the transfer and update everything public once the new affiliation is active.
Rebuild your marketing footprint and work the first 30 days deliberately.

Steps 6 and 7 are the ones people invert, and inverting them turns an orderly move into damage control.

Diligence the new brokerage properly

Get four numbers in writing before you get emotional about anyone's culture: split, cap, per-transaction fees and monthly.

eXp's published structure is 80/20 to a $16,000 cap, $149 one-time to start, $85 a month, $25 broker review per transaction and $60 per transaction in risk management. Post-cap it is $250 per transaction for the next twenty transactions, then $75. Bean Group's Mega Team cap with eXp is $4,000 rather than $16,000 — that figure is the eXp commission split cap, and the Bean Group team split is a separate line that is not capped, published by level on the partnership plans page. Ask whatever brokerage you are comparing for its equivalent list, then put both into the earnings calculator at your real transaction count.

Two traps. First, caps set locally rather than nationally: Keller Williams caps are set per market center and commonly run from about $15,000 to $36,000, with no national figure, so you have to ask the specific market center. Second, fee schedules with a published change date. Real Broker's annual fee moves from $750 to $900 on 1 September 2026 and its broker review fee from $40 to $50 the same day. A comparison built on the old column is wrong within days.

Read your own agreement before anyone reads it to you

Print your ICA and any team agreement and go through them with a pen, looking for:

Notice period, and whether it is calendar or business days.
Post-termination commission terms. Who gets paid on a deal closing after you leave, and at what split.
Non-solicitation clauses, and whether they cover clients, agents, staff or all three.
Ownership language. What the brokerage claims over supplied leads, the CRM record and the marketing you produced.
Team agreements, which are often stricter than the brokerage agreement underneath them.

Anything ambiguous is the part to get advice on, not to guess about.

Secure your database and your assets

Do this first and calmly. Subject to what your agreement permits, take:

Contacts with phone numbers, emails and addresses, exported to CSV.
Notes, tags and follow-up history. Irreplaceable, and the part people forget.
Your closed transaction history: dates, addresses, sides, volume.
Photography and video, plus the licence terms for each. Who paid the photographer usually determines who may keep using the images, and "the brokerage paid" is common.

Two lines to be careful about. A lead the brokerage bought and handed you is generally not the same as a client you sourced yourself. And a contact list living only in a company-owned CRM may be the brokerage's record regardless of who typed it in. Take what you clearly own, ask your managing broker about the rest, and get the answer in writing.

Pending transactions and listings

Listings generally belong to the brokerage, not to you. The listing agreement is between the seller and the brokerage; your name is on it as the licensee. The default when you leave is that the listing stays and is reassigned. A seller can often request a release and a broker will often grant it, but that is a negotiation rather than a right, and it depends on your contract and your state's rules.

Pending transactions usually stay with the brokerage through closing. How you are paid is governed by the post-termination language in your ICA. Some pay the full agreed split, some a reduced one, some require you to remain affiliated until closing. Read it before you resign.

Build a one-page table of every live file, its closing date and the split you expect. Take it into the resignation conversation and agree each file in writing that day.

License transfer mechanics

Your license is held under your brokerage's supervision, so changing brokerages means changing that affiliation with your state commission, and in most states you cannot practise in the gap. Prepared in advance, that is an administrative window of days. Have the onboarding pack, the state transfer form and the broker signature ready before you resign, and expect to update MLS and association records separately from your state license; they are different systems and neither updates the other.

If you hold licenses in more than one state, sequence them. The New England rules are asymmetric in ways that surprise people, and they are set out in our New England multi-state licensing guide.

Timing against your cap year

Caps run on an anniversary year, not a calendar year, and they do not travel. Pay $13,000 of a $16,000 cap and move, and you generally start again at zero. That argues for moving early in a cap year rather than late.

Run the arithmetic rather than the instinct: what you have already paid, what you would still owe if you stayed, and what you would pay under the new structure for the rest of the year. The difference between a $16,000 eXp cap and a $4,000 one can pay for the reset inside a single year. Model the team split as its own line while you are at it; it is separate from the cap and it is not capped. Bean Group's partnership plans and the calculator will get you to a number. Other inputs: association and MLS dues cycles, an annual fee you have just paid, and whether you are mid-contract on three deals in December.

The compliance section, read this one

This is general orientation, not legal advice. Contract terms and state rules vary, and the only documents that govern your situation are your own agreement and your own state's regulations.

Non-solicitation. Many agreements restrict soliciting clients, agents or staff for a defined period after you leave. Announcing a move and soliciting business are not always the same act, but where the line sits depends on your wording and your state.
Inducing breach. Encouraging a client to break an existing agreement with your former brokerage, or another agent to break theirs, can create liability independent of your own contract.
Brokerage-owned lists. Data supplied to you by the brokerage, and records held in brokerage-owned systems, may not be yours to take even where you generated the relationship.

The safe path is dull and it works: read your agreement, ask your managing broker directly what you may take and how they want clients notified, get it in writing, and if anything is unclear or the sums are large, speak to a lawyer in your state before you act rather than after. Nothing in this article is legal advice; read your agreement and talk to your managing broker.

Clients, then the broker, then the rebuild

Tell your clients before you tell your broker, subject to everything above. A client who hears it from you sounds like a professional making a considered change. A client who hears it from the reassignment call sounds like one who was left behind.

Keep the message short and forward-looking: you are moving, your license and service are unaffected, here is your new contact detail and what happens to their file. Do not editorialise about the old brokerage to a client.

Then the resignation conversation, covered in how to tell your broker you are leaving.

Afterwards, the unglamorous list: email signature, headshot and branding, MLS and association records, signage, portal profiles, review sites, social profiles, business cards, and every third-party site that lists your brokerage. Set aside a full day. The platform page covers what you rebuild on and the playbooks cover the first 90 days.

The part nobody writes about

Leaving a brokerage is a small grief, and agents who do not expect it read it as evidence they chose wrong.

You are leaving the desk you sat at during your worst year, and people who covered your showings when your father was ill. There is usually a week around day ten when your pipeline looks thin, your new systems are unfamiliar and the decision feels like a mistake. It usually is not; it is the cost of moving being paid all at once.

Give yourself a defined ramp of thirty days and judge at the end of it rather than daily. Keep the relationships, not the affiliation.

If the brokerage you are considering has a revenue share program, treat it as a secondary consideration rather than the reason. At eXp it is a pool-share model funded from company dollar, seven tiers, roughly $8,000 of pool per capping agent, and a tier 1 maximum around $1,400 a year. eXp's own income disclosure states that the median revenue share for a typical tier 1 agent is $0. Decide on the cap, the support and the fit. Our revenue share guide sets out the mechanic, and what we offer experienced agents covers what the move looks like.

Check that your sources are current

eXp program specifics change and much of what circulates online is stale. Verify any eXp figure here against eXp's own reference at exptoolkit.com/revenueshare. The parent company is now AGNT, Inc. (Nasdaq: AGNT); the eXp Realty brokerage brand is unchanged.

Frequently asked questions

Do my listings come with me when I change brokerages?

Usually not by default. The listing agreement is between the seller and the brokerage, so listings generally stay and are reassigned. A seller can often request a release and brokers frequently grant it, but that is a negotiation rather than a right. Check your agreement and your state's rules first.

Can I take my client database when I leave?

It depends on your agreement and on where the data lives. Contacts you sourced yourself are usually treated differently from leads the brokerage bought and assigned to you, and records inside a brokerage-owned CRM may belong to the brokerage. Export what you clearly own before you announce, then ask your managing broker in writing about the rest.

When should I tell my broker I am leaving?

Last. Line up the new brokerage, secure your data and marketing assets and notify your clients first, because system access is typically cut the moment you announce. Give notice in person, in the morning, early in the week, with your resignation letter and a list of pending files in hand.

What happens to deals that are pending when I switch?

They generally stay with the current brokerage through closing, and how you are paid is governed by the post-termination commission language in your agreement. Read that clause before you resign and agree the treatment of every live file in writing on the day.

Should I wait until I have capped before switching brokerages?

Not automatically. Caps run on an anniversary year and do not transfer, so money already paid toward a cap is usually lost. Run the arithmetic, and remember that a materially lower cap can repay the reset within one year.

If you want to model the move

Build the comparison before you build the emotion. Put your real transaction count into the earnings calculator and start a conversation here if you want our terms.