Real estate brokerage startup checklist

Opening a brokerage involves five kinds of work that all believe they come first. They do not — there is a dependency order, and the founders who open on schedule are the ones who run it as written. This is the national checklist; where your province renames a role or adds a step, the deep dives for Ontario and BC carry the detail. Print this, date each line, and treat blank dates as risks.

Phase 1 — licence and entity

This phase gates everything: no other line on the list becomes real until the regulator recognizes the brokerage, so its items go first and get the most calendar padding.

• Qualifying broker confirmed: broker of record (Ontario) or managing broker (BC) eligible, or education in progress with a realistic completion date
• Business entity structured with your accountant’s sign-off
• Brokerage name cleared with the regulator before domains, signage or print
• Brokerage registration or licence application filed
• Franchise agreement (if any) reviewed against every item below for collisions

Phase 2 — money and protection

• Real estate trust account opened and disclosed as your regulator requires
• Operating account separate from trust, with bookkeeping that never lets them meet
• Mandatory insurance bound (provincial E&O program), plus general business coverage
• Trust accounting method chosen — software or accountant — before the first deposit exists, not after

Phase 3 — board and data access

The quiet critical path. Board queues and agreement approvals are the items most likely to move a launch date, and none of them speed up for being urgent — file everything here the day phase 1 clears.

• Board membership application filed for your market’s board
• MLS access confirmed for the qualifying broker and first agents
• Website data agreements initiated — IDX and VOW lanes as your business requires — with the approval chain understood; the sign-off mechanics are covered in broker of record IDX and VOW approvals
• Forms and lockbox ecosystem access arranged

Phase 4 — technology and premises

• Premises decision made deliberately: office, lean space, or virtual with a registered address — and confirmed against your regulator’s premises expectations
• Stack assembled in build order — website with board data, CRM with routing, e-signature, accounting — per tech stack for a new real estate brokerage
• Email on the brokerage domain for every seat
• Website serving listings with the sold layer properly gated, brokerage identification and board attribution rendering correctly on every page

Phase 5 — opening week

• Registration, insurance and board standing all verified as active on one sheet
• First agents transferred, papered, and onboarded: seat, site, data agreements, supervision rhythm on the calendar
• Lead routing tested with a live inquiry end to end — submitted, routed, answered, logged
• Recruiting page live and the pipeline started; the office is now its own first marketing campaign
• A launch retro scheduled for day 30: what stalled, what a second office would do differently

How to actually use this

Two disciplines make the list work. Run phases 2 through 4 in parallel behind phase 1 rather than sequentially — nearly everything after registration can overlap, and the calendar compresses by months when it does. And assign every line a name and a date, including the items a lawyer, accountant or vendor owns on your behalf; “with the bank” is a status, not an owner.

One more habit worth stealing from founders who have done this twice: keep a single risk column beside the dates. Any line without an owner, any date that slipped once, any dependency waiting on a third party goes on it, and the weekly review starts there. Most opening-day disasters were visible six weeks out as an unowned line nobody wanted to claim. A brokerage that opens clean is not lucky — it is a spreadsheet that was told the truth weekly.