Buyer Representation Agreement: What Must Be In It

A California buyer representation agreement has to contain four things, it cannot run longer than 90 days, it cannot renew itself, and if you get the term wrong it is void and unenforceable. That last part is the one worth sitting with, because a void agreement is not a contract with a problem. It is not a contract.

Most of this arrived in two waves. The statute came first, effective January 2025. Then a set of regulations took effect this January that answered the questions the statute left open, and one of those answers moves the real deadline earlier than almost anyone assumes.

If you are running a new brokerage, this is a short document your agents will sign hundreds of times, which makes it exactly the kind of thing worth getting right once.

What a buyer representation agreement must contain

Civil Code section 1670.50 is the whole of a new Title 4.1 added by AB 2992. Subdivision (b) is the contents rule:

The buyer-broker representation agreement shall include, but not be limited to, terms related to all of the following: (1) Compensation of the real estate broker. (2) Services to be rendered. (3) When compensation is due. (4) Contract termination.

Four subjects. Note the wording is "terms related to," not a prescribed form of words, and not a list of clauses to copy. The statute names the topics and leaves the drafting to you. What you put under compensation is a business decision before it is a compliance one, and it interacts with how you structure splits inside the brokerage.

There is a fifth requirement that sits just outside the contents list. Subdivision (c) says that before the agreement is executed, the buyer's agent has to give the buyer the agency disclosure form required by Civil Code section 2079.14. That is the separate statutory form about agency relationships, and it has its own delivery rules and its own history, which we walked through in the piece on the agency disclosure duty. Signing the representation agreement without having handed over that form gets the order wrong.

Whether naming a subject is enough, or whether each term has to be a complete and operative provision, has not been decided. The Department of Real Estate's own statement of reasons in the rulemaking describes the statute as setting "minimum required terms and conditions," which leans toward substance over labels, but no court or regulator has drawn the line. If you are writing your own form rather than using a published one, write complete terms and do not rely on the question staying open.

Three months now means 90 calendar days

The statute says three months. Since 1 January 2026, a regulation says what that means.

Title 10 of the California Code of Regulations, section 2906.1(a), adopted by the Department of Real Estate and effective 1 January 2026:

The term "three months" as used in Section 1670.50(d)(1) and (2) of the Civil Code shall mean 90 calendar days with the first day starting on the day following the day that the last party signs the agreement, unless the parties agree in the agreement to a delayed effective date for a different starting date, in which case the 90 calendar days shall start on the agreed-upon date.

Two practical points hide in there. The clock starts the day after the last signature, not the day of it. And you can push the start date later by writing a delayed effective date into the agreement, which is the only lever you have over when the 90 days begins.

The cap does not apply where the buyer is a corporation, a limited liability company or a partnership. So an investor buying through an entity is outside it and an individual buying a house is not.

The real deadline is the first showing, not the offer

This is the part most likely to catch a working agent, and it does not appear in the statute at all.

Section 1670.50(a) says the agreement must be executed "as soon as practicable, but no later than the execution of the buyer's offer to purchase real property." Read alone, that sounds like you have until the offer.

Regulation 2906.2(a) then adds:

For purposes of Section 1670.50(a) of the Civil Code, there shall be a rebuttable presumption that it is practicable for a buyer's agent to obtain a signed buyer-broker representation agreement before the buyer's agent, or a salesperson or broker associate affiliated with that agent, shows a buyer a property in person or virtually.

A rebuttable presumption is not an absolute rule, but it puts the burden on you. If the agreement was not signed before the first showing, you are the one explaining why that was not practicable.

The regulation also defines a virtual showing, and the definition is wider than a video call. It is the agent entering the property at the buyer's direction to give a live or recorded digital walk-through to a buyer who is not physically present, including images of the exterior or interior. Walking a property with your phone up for a client who could not make it is a showing.

Open houses are not the trap people think

Regulation 2906.2(c) settles the question that generated the most noise:

A seller's agent acting solely on behalf of a seller is not acting as a buyer's agent in showing a property to potential buyers, whether at an open house or any other showing.

If you are sitting your own listing, the people walking through are not your buyer clients and you do not need a signed agreement from each of them. The requirement attaches when you start representing one of them as a buyer, which is a different moment and usually a later one.

The renewal has to be signed before the old one expires

Automatic renewal is banned outright by the statute. The regulation then adds a deadline that is easy to miss.

Section 2906.1(d) requires any renewal to be "in writing, dated, and signed by the parties prior to the expiration of the original agreement," and sets the renewal's effective date as the day the last party signs.

So a lapsed agreement cannot be renewed. If day 91 arrives without a signed renewal, there is nothing to extend, and you are starting a new agreement rather than continuing one. On a 90 day clock with a buyer who has been looking for four months, that is a diary item, not a detail.

Void and unenforceable is worse than a penalty

Section 1670.50(d)(3): "A buyer-broker representation agreement that is made in violation of this subdivision is void and unenforceable."

Subdivision (e) adds that a licensee who violates the section "shall be deemed to have violated that person's licensing law," which puts the Department of Real Estate in the picture separately.

Be clear about what void means here. It is not that you have a contract and face a sanction. It is that the document you would sue on, to recover the compensation you earned, does not exist. The buyer who closes with someone else after signing a four month agreement with you has signed something that cannot be enforced.

We could not find a single California court decision or published Department of Real Estate disciplinary decision applying this clause, and we looked twice. That is an honest absence rather than a comfort: the statute is young, and being the first test case is not a goal.

The notice, the boldface, and the word that was wrong until January

Separately from the agreement itself, Business and Professions Code section 10147.5 governs the compensation notice.

Any printed or form agreement establishing a right to compensation for the purchase of residential property of not more than four units has to carry this, "in not less than 10-point boldface type immediately preceding any provision of such agreement relating to compensation of the licensee":

Notice: The amount or rate of real estate compensation is not fixed by law. They are set by each broker individually and may be negotiable between the buyer and broker.

Two things about that sentence are worth knowing.

The typography is part of the rule. Ten point, boldface, and positioned immediately before the compensation provision. A notice buried on page three in body text does not satisfy a rule that specifies where it sits.

And the last three words were wrong until this year. As AB 2992 originally enacted the purchase-side notice, it read "negotiable between the seller and broker," which is the sale-side wording copied across. A buyer's agent was required by law to hand buyers a notice telling them their compensation was negotiable with the other side of the deal. It took AB 1521, a judiciary omnibus bill, to fix it, and the Legislative Counsel's Digest calls it a "technical correction" to "clarify that the rate at issue is that paid by a buyer to the broker." The corrected version took effect 1 January 2026.

If your form was printed for the 2025 season, it is carrying the old sentence.

You cannot pre-print your rate

Subdivision (c) of the same section: "The amount or rate of compensation shall not be printed in any such agreement."

Not "should be negotiable." Not printed. A form that arrives at the table with a number already on it is not a compliant form, which is a real constraint on how brokerages build their templates and one that quietly pushes every conversation about compensation into the open. That is the point of it.

Five states, five different answers on the clock

There is no national rule here, and the differences are not small. We checked these at the statutes and regulator publications themselves.

California is roughly eight times stricter than Oregon, and it is the only one of the five that voids a non-compliant agreement rather than simply requiring a different number.

Two of these are worth a closer look if you work across a border. Oregon's ORS 696.810 counts automatic renewals toward its 24 months, which means Oregon permits auto-renewal and simply caps the total, the opposite of California's approach. And Washington's RCW 18.86.020 requires the agreement to carry checkbox options letting the buyer choose an exclusive or nonexclusive relationship, a contents rule California does not have.

A word on what we did not establish: we did not complete a current-law review of all fifty states, so treat this as five states verified rather than a claim that no other state caps the term.

What about the NAR settlement?

The settlement is the reason written buyer agreements became universal practice, but it is not the source of any of the rules above, and it imposes no duration limit at all. Its written-agreement requirement runs to REALTOR MLS Participants rather than to every licensee, and its contents requirements are about compensation: the amount or rate must be conspicuously specified, it must be objectively ascertainable rather than open-ended, and the licensee cannot collect more than the agreement says.

The settlement's approval survived appeal. The Eighth Circuit affirmed in Gibson v. National Association of Realtors, No. 24-3473, filed 1 September 2026, which incorporates the analysis of the companion Burnett opinion and concludes simply: "For all these reasons, and those expressed in Burnett, we affirm."

So if you are in California, comply with the statute and the regulations. They are stricter than the settlement on every point where the two overlap, and they are the ones with a void clause.

The short version

1. Four subjects in the agreement: compensation, services, when compensation is due, termination.
2. Ninety calendar days, starting the day after the last signature.
3. Signed before the first showing, in person or virtual, unless you can rebut the presumption.
4. Renewal in writing and signed before the old one expires.
5. The 10-point boldface notice, with the current wording, immediately before the compensation provision.
6. No rate printed on the form.

None of that is hard. All of it is easy to get wrong once and then repeat several hundred times, which is the actual risk for a brokerage rather than any single deal.

Everything above was read from the statutes, regulations and opinions themselves, and the sources are linked so you can check them. Rules as at 18 September 2026.

This is also worth checking against the rest of what your brokerage publishes, since the same forms and claims tend to show up on the site: we covered that ground in brokerage website requirements.

If you want the same treatment applied to your brokerage's site and the forms it hands people, our free website teardown is where to start.