Who actually owns your agency's website? Six checks to run before you sign anything

On 30 July 2026 I read the offer page for a bundled real estate website product, realty.fr/site-web-agence. It is a clear, well-built page. It promises a site that is “totally personalised, editable 24/7 and included in your subscription,” with the domain name and hosting included and managed for you, at a launch price of €99 per month.

Here is what the page does not say, and I checked line by line: who the domain name belongs to if you cancel; what happens to the site itself if you stop paying; how long the commitment runs; and what the price becomes once the launch offer ends.

I want to be precise about what that means, because it would be lazy and unfair to turn it into an accusation. It is an absence of information on a public offer page, nothing more. The answers may be perfectly reasonable. The domain may well be registered in your name from day one, and the contract may let you walk away with everything. That is exactly the point: you cannot know from the outside, so you have to ask, in writing, before you sign or renew.

This article is built on public offer pages I read myself and one observation from an audit sitting in my own files. It is not built on a client dispute. I have no contract, no invoice, and no horror story to tell you, and I am not going to invent one to make the point land harder.

Why this bites harder in real estate than anywhere else

This is reasoning, not data, and I will present it as such.

In most industries, changing your website means changing your website. In a real estate agency, the site is very often supplied by the same vendor as the property software. The listings live in the software. The site displays them through a feed. The portal syndication runs off the same database. So “I'd like to redo my website” quietly becomes “I'd like to change my CRM, my property database, and my portal feeds at the same time, during the selling season.”

That is why the switching cost in this vertical is not a design problem or a budget problem. It is an operations problem. And it is precisely why the ownership questions deserve fifteen minutes of your time before the contract, not on the day you decide to leave.

The six checks

Do them in order. You need a browser, your email archive, and your contract PDF. You do not need to call anyone yet, and I would suggest you don't until you have the six answers.

1. Who is the registrant of the domain name

What to open: a whois lookup. lookup.icann.org covers .com and most generic extensions; for .fruse AFNIC's whois, for .beuse the DNS Belgium lookup. Type your domain without the “www.”

What to read: two fields. The registrant (the holder) and the registrar (the company where the name is parked).

A good answer:the registrant is your company's legal name, with your address and an email address on a mailbox you control.

A bad answer: the registrant is your web provider or software vendor, or the contact email is something like contact@yourprovider.com. Also worth noticing: privacy redaction is normal on many extensions, so if the fields are masked, treat that as “unconfirmed” rather than “bad” and put it on the list of things to ask.

The check behind the check: being named as registrant is not the same as being able to act. Can you log in to the registrar account yourself and request a transfer code? If you cannot log in, your ownership is theoretical.

2. Who owns the hosting account

What to open:your email archive. Search the hosting provider's name, plus “invoice” and “renewal.”

A good answer:an account in your company's name, invoices addressed to you, a control panel you can log into, and a card you recognise being charged.

A bad answer:nothing at all, because hosting is “included.” That is not automatically wrong, and on a €99-a-month bundle it is exactly what you are buying. But be clear with yourself about what it means: hosting is then a service that stops when the contract stops, not an asset you hold.

The follow-up question either way: if you stopped paying tomorrow, does a copy of the site exist anywhere that is not on their infrastructure? Ask where backups live, in what format, and whether you can download one today.

3. Does a real admin login actually exist, and what can it do

What to do:log in. Not “we have a login somewhere in an email” — actually log in, right now.

Then try four things in a row:

1. Edit the text of an existing page.
2. Create a new page.
3. Change a menu item.
4. Find a Users or Settings screen where you could create a second administrator.

A good answer: all four work, and you can see a user list in which your account holds the highest role.

A bad answer:you can only edit listings, which means you are in the property software and not in the website. Or the “admin” is a customer portal whose edit button opens a support ticket. Or you can change content but cannot create another admin — which tells you plainly that someone else holds the real key.

Note that “editable 24/7,” the phrase in that offer page, is a promise about editing content. It is a different promise from owning the CMS. Both can be true, but one does not imply the other.

4. Can the content and the listings be exported

Two exports, not one. This is the check most people do halfway.

Editorial content: pages, blog posts, images, legal notices. Look for Export, Backup, or Download in the admin.

The property database: listings with references, descriptions, prices, EPC data, and photos at original resolution, plus the history of sold properties.

A good answer: you can produce a file today, unaided, in a standard format — CSV, XML, JSON, a database dump, a ZIP of images.

A bad answer: there is no export button; or the export is a PDF or a print view; or you get listing references with no photos; or the images come out at compressed web resolution, which means you would rebuild your catalogue from thumbnails.

Do it properly: run the export, open the file, count the listings, and check that one property really carries its photos. An export button that has never been clicked is not an export. While you are there, save your sitemap.xml too — your published URLs are an asset, and they are the part that carries your Google rankings.

5. Who owns the code

What to open: the contract, and the search function inside the PDF.

What to look for:the wording around intellectual property. A transfer of rights (“cession de droits”) is ownership. A licence for the duration of the subscription is not, and it is the normal, entirely legitimate default in bundled offers.

A good answer:either you own a copy of the code, or the site runs on a standard, named platform — WordPress with a named theme, for example — so that even the parts you don't own could be reproduced by someone else.

A bad answer: nobody can tell you what the site runs on.

That last case is not hypothetical. In my own files there is an audit of a real Belgian agency, Etimo, near Charleroi. The platform field of that audit reads: “CMS immobilier custom (non identifié avec certitude)”— a custom real estate CMS, not identified with certainty. The same audit had no trouble pinning down that the H1 of the homepage was the word “Accueil” and that the parser found zero call-to-action buttons on the whole page. It could measure the site. It could not name what the site was made of. When even a technical audit cannot determine the platform, the practical question of “could this be moved elsewhere” mostly answers itself.

6. How dependent is the site on the property software feed

The real estate specific one, and the one nobody asks before signing.

What to establish:where do the listings physically live? Inside the website's own database, or fetched from the property software through a gateway or XML feed?

What to click:open one listing page and view the page source (Ctrl+U). Search for the property reference and a phrase from the description. If they appear in the HTML, the data is at least being served through your site. If the listing block is an embedded widget or an iframe pointing at another domain, your website is a shell around someone else's content.

Then check the URLs: are your property pages on your own domain, or on a subdomain belonging to the software vendor? That single detail decides who keeps the accumulated SEO if you ever move.

Then ask two questions in writing:who owns the field mapping between the software and the site, and can that same feed be pointed at a different website while you keep the same software? A vendor who answers “yes, here is the documentation” has just told you the feed is a product. A vendor who cannot answer has told you the feed exists only between their software and their websites.

What to do with your six answers

Sort them into three piles, not two. Yours. Rented. Unknown.

Rented is not a scandal. Plenty of well-run agencies rent their hosting, their CMS and their theme, on purpose, because they would rather pay a monthly fee than own an infrastructure they have no interest in maintaining. The pile that should worry you is Unknown, because unknown is what turns into a three-week standoff on the exact week you needed the site to change.

If your six answers come back clean, the correct decision is to stay, note the answers somewhere you'll find them again, and go back to work. That is a genuinely good outcome, and it is one of the two outcomes this article is written to produce.

Why I have no stake in your answer

There is a reason this subject is well covered and badly covered at the same time. When I ran the search on 30 July 2026, one results page gave me nine different web agencies, each with a dedicated article on how to leave your provider and recover your site. Nine pages, nine companies whose business model is to become your next provider. On the other side of the same query sit the vendors selling the all-inclusive monthly subscription. Both camps are selling. Neither is a neutral referee.

I sell a PDF for between nothing and nine dollars. I am not bidding for your redesign, so I gain nothing if you leave, and nothing if you stay. That is the only credibility argument I can offer here, and I think it is the right one for this particular subject.

For what it's worth on the money side: €99 a month is just under €3,600 over three years, which is a number worth putting next to what a one-off build actually costs at each budget tier — I broke those tiers down in what a real estate agency website really costs. Sometimes the subscription wins that comparison outright, especially once you count maintenance. Run it with your own numbers.

And to be clear about scope: these six checks tell you what you own. They say nothing about whether the site is any good. That is a separate audit with separate criteria, which is what the 15-point checklist is for, and what the Club Immobilier teardown shows end to end on a real site.

Hamza Benjaaba

Web designer and no-code developer, specialized in websites for real estate agencies and local service businesses. I audit real agency sites with the dev console open before I touch a pixel, which is how I end up writing down things like a platform field that says “not identified with certainty.” I sell written products, not redesign retainers, so on the question of whether you should leave your current provider I genuinely have nothing to win either way.