Brokerage vs Agent Reviews: Who Owns the Profile

When an agent leaves a brokerage, who owns the reviews depends on which profile the review was actually left on: reviews on the agent's individual Zillow, Realtor.com, or RateMyAgent profile generally travel with the agent, while reviews on the brokerage's Google Business Profile — tied to the office location, not any one person — stay with the brokerage. The confusion happens because a client who worked closely with one agent often doesn't realize they left a review on the office's shared profile rather than that agent's own. This split causes real friction for teams and brokerages, and getting ahead of it matters more the larger a team gets. Brokerages that track reviews per agent and per office from the start avoid the scramble that happens when a top-producing agent leaves and everyone discovers, too late, that nobody was clear on which reviews were ever actually theirs. Who owns what: individual agent profiles vs. office profiles Most of the major real estate portals — Zillow, Realtor.com, RateMyAgent — let an individual agent claim a personal profile separate from any brokerage, and reviews left there are tied to the agent by name, not to the brokerage. When that agent changes brokerages, those reviews generally move with them, since the portal associates the review with the agent's identity rather than their current employer. Google Business Profile works differently in a brokerage context. A brokerage's physical office location has its own Google Business Profile, typically managed by the broker or office manager, and reviews left there — from a client who called the main office line, walked in, or worked with "whichever agent was available" — belong to that office profile, not to any individual agent, even the one who actually did the work. Our guide on Google Business Profile for real estate agents covers the individual-vs-office split in more depth, including how to set up both correctly from the start. A nuance worth naming: this isn't unique to real estate A similar ownership question comes up in other licensed-professional industries where an individual works under a larger organization's brand. A captive insurance agent working exclusively under one carrier's brand typically doesn't own a separate Google Business Profile the way an independent agent representing several carriers does — the profile structure follows the business relationship, not just the individual's day-to-day client work. Real estate agents inside a brokerage face a comparable structural question: how much of your online reputation is genuinely portable, and how much is tied to an entity you don't personally control, is worth understanding well before a brokerage change forces the question. What happens in practice when an agent leaves Consider a fictional example: Marcus Oyelaran spent six years building a strong Zillow profile and a shared presence on his former brokerage's Google Business Profile at Harbor Point Properties. When he moved to a new firm, his Zillow reviews and transaction history came with him automatically, since that profile was always tied to him individually. His presence on Harbor Point's Google profile, however, stayed behind — the reviews clients left there, even ones that specifically thanked Marcus by name in the review text, remained attached to Harbor Point's office listing, not to Marcus's new Google presence, which started essentially from zero at his new brokerage. This is the exact scenario that surprises agents who assumed all of their online reputation was personally portable. The practical lesson: an agent relying heavily on a shared brokerage Google profile, rather than building and maintaining their own individual profile from early in their career, is accumulating reputation in an asset they may not fully control later. What brokerages should set up before this becomes a problem Encourage every agent to claim an individual profile on Zillow, Realtor.com, and RateMyAgent early, rather than relying solely on the brokerage's shared presence — this protects both the agent's long-term interests and gives the brokerage a clearer picture of which reviews belong where. Keep the office Google Business Profile's reviews tagged or tracked by which agent actually did the work, even though the reviews themselves stay with the office profile — this matters for internal recognition and coaching, separate from the public-facing ownership question. Set clear expectations in onboarding about which platforms are "yours" as an individual agent and which are shared brokerage assets, so this isn't a surprise conversation that only comes up when someone's already decided to leave. Update departing and arriving agents' profiles promptly. A profile still showing a former brokerage months after a move creates doubt for a prospective client trying to verify an agent is still active, and a new agent's profile sitting unclaimed at a new brokerage looks abandoned at exactly the moment they need it most. Why this matters more as a team grows A solo agent with no team and no shared profile rarely runs into this question at all — their individual reviews and their public reputation are effectively the same thing. The complexity scales with team size: a five-agent team sharing one brand and one Google Business Profile has five people's worth of client relationships feeding into reviews that, on paper, belong to the team or brokerage rather than to any one agent individually. A team lead who hasn't thought through how departures will be handled is setting up a future conversation that's much harder to have fairly after someone's already decided to leave than before anyone has. This isn't legal advice Exactly how review ownership and portability work can vary by portal's specific terms of service, and brokerage agreements sometimes include their own language about marketing assets and client relationships that intersects with this question. A brokerage or agent facing an actual dispute over review ownership, rather than just planning ahead, should check the specific platform's current terms and consult an attorney familiar with real estate brokerage agreements rather than relying on general guidance like this. Team and brokerage reviews when several agents share one profile Teams running under one shared brand face a related but distinct challenge: reviews pile up on a shared profile with no clear way to tell, at a glance, which team member a client actually worked with. Tagging reviews internally by agent — even informally, in a shared spreadsheet — helps a team lead recognize individual performance and route any negative feedback to the right person for follow-up, without changing who technically owns the review on the platform itself. Our broader guide on real estate reputation management covers the full picture of managing reviews across individual agents, teams, and brokerage offices at once. If I leave my brokerage, can I ask clients to re-review me at my new firm? You can ask, the same way you'd ask for any review — but don't frame it as replacing or duplicating a review that already exists for the brokerage's office profile, and never offer anything in exchange for a new review at the new firm. Do RateMyAgent reviews work the same way as Zillow's? RateMyAgent is generally built around the individual agent similarly to Zillow, but confirm the platform's current specific rules before assuming identical portability mechanics across every portal. Can a brokerage prevent a departing agent from taking their individual Zillow reviews? Generally no — those reviews are tied to the agent's identity on the platform itself, not something a brokerage agreement can unilaterally reassign, though this is exactly the kind of question worth confirming with an attorney if it's an active dispute rather than hypothetical planning. 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