Every state and province licenses the people who sell real estate, and every regulator keeps a roster. Those rosters are the most complete list of real estate professionals that exists, because you cannot legally practice without being on one. This guide covers what the roster contains and how to use it, not how we obtain it.
What a license record contains
At minimum: the licensee's name, the license number, the license type, the status, the original issue date and the expiration date. Most regulators also publish the sponsoring broker or office, the office address and a public address of record for the licensee. Some publish disciplinary history, continuing education status or the county of practice. Very few publish a phone or email, which is why a license file is usually sold with contact data matched from elsewhere.
License types differ by state
The common structure is a salesperson or associate license that must hang under a broker, and a broker license that can operate independently or sponsor others. States vary in the names, in whether there is a distinct associate broker tier, and in whether appraisers, property managers or timeshare salespeople share the same roster. A file that spans states has to normalize these to a common vocabulary while preserving the regulator's original term, so that a filter for "broker" behaves the same in Texas and Ontario and an auditor can still see what the regulator actually said.
Statuses are not binary
"Active" is the status most buyers want, and it is the most consistent across regulators. Beyond it the vocabulary expands: inactive, expired, suspended, revoked, probation, pending, referral-only, and various forms of parked or escrowed licenses for people who are keeping a license without practicing. The distinctions matter. An inactive licensee can reactivate quickly and is a recruiting prospect. An expired one may be gone for good. A file that collapses everything to active or not throws that away.
Why expirations cluster
Most states put every license on the same renewal cycle, often one or two years, often ending on a fixed date. That produces a wave of expirations on the same day, a rush of renewals in the weeks before it, and a visible drop in active counts in the month after it as the people who did not renew fall off. Anyone comparing month-over-month counts needs to know the cycle for each state, or the drop looks like a data error. It also means a renewal window is a recruiting window, because agents deciding whether to renew are deciding whether to stay in the business and with whom.
The monthly delta is the product
A single snapshot of a roster is a directory. Two snapshots compared are a signal. Between one month and the next, new licensees appear, licenses lapse, agents move from one broker to another, and statuses change. Each of those is a row in a delta file with the change type and the date it was first observed. Brokerages recruit from the new-licensee and broker-move rows. Lenders and title companies check the lapsed rows before paying a referral. Proptech products use the deltas to keep an agent directory current without reloading the whole file.
Matching contact data
Because regulators rarely publish contact information, a license file is matched to consumer and professional data on name, address and office. The match should be reported honestly: the share of records with an email, the share with a phone, and the share of phones that a carrier confirms are mobiles. On our national file about three quarters of records carry an email or a phone, and the figure is stated on every coverage page rather than assumed.
License data versus listing data
A license roster tells you who is allowed to sell. Listing data tells you who is actually selling, and how much. The two disagree constantly: a large share of licensees have no listings in a given year, and the producing agents are a minority of the roster. If the brief is "every agent," you want the roster. If it is "producing agents," you want listings joined to the roster. The comparison page works through the choice.
Questions
Does a license file include phone numbers and emails?
Regulators rarely publish them. A licensed file adds contact data matched from consumer and professional sources, and the share matched should be reported, not assumed.
How many real estate agents are there?
Our file carries about 2.5 million active license records across the US and Canada as of the last refresh, with counts per jurisdiction on the coverage pages.
Can I get only producing agents?
Join the roster to listing data. The roster alone tells you who is licensed, not who is selling.