Before you list your home, you will probably interview two or three agents. You will hear about pricing, marketing and their last sale. What nobody hands you is a way to check the one piece of their marketing you can test yourself: the brokerage's website, where your home will live for weeks.
That test takes about ten minutes. We ran it on 43 Sacramento-area brokerage websites on October 26, 2026. Here is what each check is, why it matters to you as a seller, and what we found.
A license number you can look up
Opens without a security warning
Loads on a phone
A texted link shows a picture
A wrong address helps you back
Email on the brokerage's own name
| Check | What we found on 43 brokerage websites (Oct 26, 2026) |
|---|---|
| A license number you can look up | 21 show one on the homepage; 16 show none on the pages we read |
| Opens without a security warning | 6 do not send the plain http address to the secure one; 2 of those also show a certificate warning |
| Loads on a phone | 2 of the 40 we could time show their main content within 2.5 seconds; the middle site took 8.1 |
| A texted link shows a picture | 18 of the 41 we could read show no picture |
| A wrong address helps you back | 12 strand the visitor with no way back into the site |
| Email on the brokerage's own name | 4 show a Gmail or Apple address; 6 show no address on the pages we read |
None of these tell you whether an agent will sell your home well. They tell you how carefully the brokerage looks after the place where buyers will see it. Sellers say marketing is what they want most: in the National Association of Realtors' 2025 profile of buyers and sellers, sellers want an agent "to help them market their home for sale, price it competitively" and sell it on time (NAR is the agents' trade association). The website is the part of that marketing you can inspect before you sign.
Find a license number and look it up
In California, a brokerage's own website has to show a license number. The state's regulation lists "Websites owned, controlled, and/or maintained by the soliciting real estate licensee" among the materials that must show the licensee's "eight (8) digit real estate license identification number and responsible broker's name" (10 CCR 2773). The number has to be in type no smaller than the smallest type on the page.
How to check: scroll to the bottom of the homepage and look for "DRE #" or "License #" followed by eight digits. Then type that number into the Department of Real Estate's free Public License Lookup. It tells you whether the license is active and which broker is responsible. Do the same for the agent you are interviewing, by name.
What we found: 21 of the 43 homepages show a license number. Four more show one on an inner page, such as About or Contact. Two have one only inside a pop-up or a closed team bio, which a seller would have to click to find. On the other 16, we found no license number on the homepage or the two other pages we read.
A missing number is not proof the brokerage is unlicensed. It does mean you have to ask for it, and a brokerage that skips a rule this visible is worth one more question about the rules you cannot see.
Open it and look for a warning
Type the brokerage's address into your phone's browser starting with "http://" (no s), then again starting with "https://". A good site moves the first to the secure version and opens the second with no warning. A site that stays on plain "http" is marked "Not secure", and a site with a broken certificate shows a full-page warning on the secure address that most people will not click past.
What we found: 6 of the 43 do not move a visitor from the plain http address to the secure one, so a link that starts with http can leave a visitor on the unsecured page, marked "Not secure" (some browsers switch to the secure version on their own, but not every visitor's does). Two of those six also fail the certificate check: one certificate expired in 2019, and the other was issued for a different web address. On those two, anyone who opens the secure address sees a full-page warning first. More detail is in our website security check.
Time it on your phone
Open the homepage on your phone, away from home Wi-Fi, and count how long it takes for the main picture or headline to appear. Google's guidance for a good experience is 2.5 seconds or less for the main content (Google makes Chrome and runs Search, and this page was last updated in September 2025).
What we found: We loaded each homepage the way a mid-range phone on a slow 4G connection would. Of the 40 we could time, 2 showed their main content within 2.5 seconds. The middle site took 8.1 seconds, and 16 took longer than ten. The slowest took 26 seconds, mostly because its homepage plays a 33 MB video. Three sites could not be timed: one blocks automated visits, one has the broken certificate from the check above, and one did not finish loading in our test tool.
A slow homepage usually means slow listing pages too, and buyers browse on phones. Our speed test of the same sites explains the usual causes.
Text yourself the link
Copy the homepage address and text it to yourself. Your phone builds a small preview card from a few lines of hidden code on the page. A good one shows a picture and the brokerage's name. A poor one shows a grey box and a bare address, and that is how your listing link will look when your agent texts it to a buyer's agent.
What we found: 18 of the 41 homepages we could read give that card no picture: 15 name no image, and 3 name one that no longer exists. Two sites could not be read at all. Our link preview check shows what a good card needs.
Type a wrong address
Add a made-up word to the end of the address, such as /my-home, and press Go. Old flyers and mistyped links send real buyers to pages like this every day. A good site says the page is missing and gives you a menu or a search to find your way back. A poor one shows a blank page or a host's error with no way back into the site.
What we found: 12 of the 43 strand the visitor: a host's error page, a blank page or a bare message with no menu, no search and no link home. The other 31 offer at least a link back in. Four sites also answer a missing address as if it were a real page, which can leave dead pages sitting in Google. More on what a good one looks like in our 404 page check.
Look at the email address
Find the contact email. An address on the brokerage's own name (like jane@brokeragename.com) is harder for a stranger to imitate than a free mailbox. That matters because real estate is a favourite target for payment fraud. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report counted 12,368 real estate fraud complaints and $275.1 million in reported losses, up from $173.6 million in 2024. That category also includes rental and timeshare scams, so it is not all closings, but the advice is the same: never send money on instructions that arrive only by email.
What we found: 4 of the 43 sites show a Gmail or Apple address, two of them alongside a business address. 6 show no email address on any page we read, including the contact page where there is one. The other 33 show an address on a business domain, nearly always their own. Our email deliverability check covers the records behind those addresses.
What to ask before you list your home
You do not need to grade a brokerage on all six. Use what you find to ask better questions in the interview:
- "Where will my listing appear on your website, and can you show me one you have now on your phone?"
- "What is your license number and your broker's?" (if the site does not show them)
- "How will you confirm any instructions about money before closing?"
- "Who looks after your website, and how quickly do they fix something that breaks?"
A good agent will answer all four without fuss. If the website is weak but the answers are strong, that is a fair trade. If both are weak, keep interviewing. If you are weighing a pitch to sell privately instead, read what sellers give up with private exclusive listings first.
How we did this, so you can check it
- The sample. Every live website from our two earlier Sacramento-area audits: brokerage corporations licensed in Sacramento County since 2024 (residential) and Sacramento-region corporations with Commercial or CRE in their licensed name (commercial), the same 43 as our earlier checks. Several are commercial firms, which a home seller would not hire; the checks apply the same way.
- The read. Every number here was collected again on October 26, 2026, not copied from our earlier posts. We loaded each homepage and two linked pages in Chrome with a normal desktop browser identity and read the visible text for a license number and a phone number. We read each homepage's preview code and fetched the image it names, checked each site's certificate and what happens at the plain http address, loaded one made-up address on each site, and listed every email address on the homepage, the contact page and two other linked pages, leaving out font and template credits hidden in the page code. For speed we ran Google's Lighthouse tool once per homepage with its standard phone settings (a mid-range phone on slow 4G); one run is a snapshot, so a single site can vary by a second or two from day to day, but the overall picture matched our three-run test of the same sites in September. Sites our automated browser could not read were opened by hand in an ordinary browser. No forms were filled in.
- Limits. Forty-three firms, one region, one day, and only the pages we read. A license number on a page we did not open would not be counted. No firm is named, because the point is the checklist, not the scorecard.