As a site designed to give real estate agents, teams, and brokerages actionable, strategic insight from industry professionals, The Close prides itself on fostering robust conversation on topics from licensing to lead generation to technology, and everything in between. 

But in order to serve the working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level, our comments are moderated by real humans. As you’ll see in countless articles across our site, authors often personally respond to readers’ questions. 

This also means it might take a little longer to see your comment pop up in the conversation. Since we cover diverse topics—from emerging marketing strategies to cutting-edge psychology to disruptive technology—for a large audience, we hear from a fair number of spammers and others who don’t have the best intentions for the industry in mind. 

That’s why not every comment makes it through our moderation queue. We reserve the right to decline to post comments without explanation, but here are some of the reasons we might do so:

• Links: We don’t disallow links in comments, but we are very picky about them. We only approve comments with links when they are pointing to hyper-relevant locations that significantly contribute to the conversation. While we want to foster our reader’s financial success, attempts to promote your business, gain backlinks, boost traffic, or other types of self-promotion are not allowed.
• Copyright-protected or private info: If we have reason to suspect your comment includes proprietary or personal information that you don’t have the right to publicize, we will decline to publish your comment on our site. 
• Personal attacks on The Close or our community: There’s simply no cause to be rude, hurl insults, foster hate, or breed hostility here. That’s not to say your comments need to be positive in order to be posted, just that they should offer more than pure negativity. 
• Spreading misinformation or concealing your identity: We seek to foster a community built on trust at The Close. While you don’t need to tell us everything about who you are in order to engage in the conversation, we do expect you to be honest about who and what you represent. Shilling for your company under an assumed name will not be tolerated. 
• Extraneous or unrelated content: Are you sure you’re commenting on the right post? In an effort to streamline conversation and avoid confusing readers, we may occasionally decline to post comments that are off-topic or belong on another section of the website. 

Repeated violators of these guidelines risk being permanently banned from commenting at The Close. Thank you for committing to being a constructive member of our community and adding your voice to our mission of making real estate better every day.