ca-real-estate-license-verify

California DRE Real Estate License Verification

Purpose

Given an 8-digit California Department of Real Estate (DRE) license number, fetch the public licensee record from https://www2.dre.ca.gov/publicasp/pplinfo.asp and return a Zod-validated JSON object containing the licensee name, license type, status, expiration date, mailing address, responsible broker (where applicable), and any disciplinary action history (comments + linked PDF document filenames). Read-only; never mutates state.

When to Use

• "Is California real estate license 01974439 still valid?"
• Pre-funding / pre-listing due-diligence on an agent or broker.
• Bulk verification of a list of licensees (one HTTP call per ID, ~1 s each).
• Confirming a broker's disciplinary history before signing a representation agreement.
• Cross-referencing a Salesperson against their Responsible Broker or cross-referencing a Corporation against its Licensed Officer(s) and affiliated Salespersons.

Workflow

DRE's public-lookup endpoint is a vanilla classic-ASP page (Microsoft IIS 10.0) served over plain HTTPS. No anti-bot, no rate-limiting cookies, no JavaScript required to render the detail page, no proxies needed. Crucially, the detail page has a stable deep-link URL — you do not need to fill the form. Lead with fetch; the browser flow exists only as a fallback for the small subset of agents that cannot make HTTP calls.

1. Deep-link fetch (recommended)

curl -s "https://www2.dre.ca.gov/publicasp/pplinfo.asp?License_id=01974439"

Returns a small (~4–8 KB) HTML detail page when the ID exists, or the ~18 KB empty-form page when it does not.

Equivalent forms (all 200-OK, all return the same body):

Inside the Browserbase environment:

browse cloud fetch "https://www2.dre.ca.gov/publicasp/pplinfo.asp?License_id=01974439"

(browse cloud fetch supports GET only; for the POST variant, use a remote session and an in-page fetch() call — see Browser Fallback.)

2. Detect success vs. not-found

Do not rely on HTTP status — both shapes are 200 OK.

3. Parse the detail table

Every field is a <tr> of two <td> cells: a labeled <strong> on the left and the value (in a nested <FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica" size=2>) on the right. Markup hasn't changed since the page's 2010 footer line. Stable single-pass regex per field (HTML, not text):

licensee_name      /<strong>Name:<\/strong>[\s\S]*?size=2>([^<]+)/
license_type       /<strong>License Type:<\/strong>[\s\S]*?size=2>([^<]+)/
license_id         /<strong>License ID:<\/strong>[\s\S]*?size=2>([^<]+)/
mailing_address    /<strong>Mailing Address:<\/strong>[\s\S]*?size=2>([\s\S]*?)<\/font>/   (multi-line; join <br/> with ", ")
expiration_date    /<strong>Expiration Date:<\/strong>[\s\S]*?size=2>([^<]+)/   (MM/DD/YY)
license_status     /<strong>(?:<A[^>]*>)?License Status(?:<\/A>)?:<\/strong>[\s\S]*?size=2>([^<]+)/
issued_date        /<strong>(?:<A[^>]*>)?(?:Salesperson|Broker|Corporation|Officer) License Issued(?:<\/A>)?:<\/strong>[\s\S]*?size=2>([^<]+)/

For the Comment / Disciplinary section, capture every <tr> whose left <td> <strong> is empty (sub-rows) starting from the Comment: row until the trailing sentinel >>>> Public information request complete <<<<. Then walk forward to capture Disciplinary or Formal Action Documents: links — each H#####FR_YYMMDD_*.pdf filename is a separate document.

4. Validate with Zod

const License = z.object({
  success: z.literal(true),
  license_id: z.string().regex(/^\d{8}$/),
  licensee_name: z.string(),
  license_type: z.enum(["SALESPERSON", "BROKER", "OFFICER", "CORPORATION"]),
  license_status: z.enum([
    "LICENSED", "EXPIRED", "REVOKED", "SUSPENDED",
    "SURRENDERED", "CANCELED", "DELINQUENT"
  ]).optional(),                                   // omitted on OFFICER rows
  expiration_date: z.string().regex(/^\d{2}\/\d{2}\/\d{2}$/).optional(),
  issued_date:    z.string().regex(/^\d{2}\/\d{2}\/\d{2}$/).optional(),
  mailing_address: z.string(),
  address_unreliable: z.boolean().default(false),  // see Gotchas
  former_names: z.array(z.string()).default([]),
  responsible_broker: z.object({
    license_id: z.string(), name: z.string(), address: z.string()
  }).nullable().optional(),                        // SALESPERSON-only
  affiliated_corporations: z.array(z.object({
    license_id: z.string(), name: z.string(), status: z.string()
  })).default([]),                                 // BROKER / OFFICER
  licensed_officers: z.array(z.object({
    license_id: z.string(), name: z.string(),
    expiration_date: z.string(), role: z.string().optional()
  })).default([]),                                 // CORPORATION
  affiliated_salespersons_count: z.number().optional(), // CORPORATION
  dbas: z.array(z.object({ name: z.string(), period: z.string() })).default([]),
  branches: z.array(z.string()).default([]),
  disciplinary_actions: z.array(z.string()).default([]),
  disciplinary_documents: z.array(z.string()).default([]),
});
const NotFound = z.object({
  success: z.literal(false),
  license_id: z.string(),
  error_reasoning: z.literal("License ID not found in DRE database"),
});
export const Result = z.union([License, NotFound]);

Browser Fallback

Only if HTTP isn't an option (sandbox blocks outbound fetch, etc.):

sid=$(browse cloud sessions create --keep-alive | node -e "let s='';process.stdin.on('data',c=>s+=c).on('end',()=>process.stdout.write(JSON.parse(s).id))")
export BROWSE_SESSION="$sid"
browse open "https://www2.dre.ca.gov/publicasp/pplinfo.asp?License_id=01974439" --remote
browse get html body --remote   # then apply regex above
browse cloud sessions update "$sid" --status REQUEST_RELEASE

Do NOT use browse click on the form's Find submit button — see Site-Specific Gotchas: it tears down the CDP socket mid-navigation.

Site-Specific Gotchas

• The form submit() tears down the CDP connection. Calling browse click @<find-button-ref> (or document.entry_form.submit() via browse eval) on this page reliably kills the CDP socket with socket-close code=1006, leaving the session in a wedged state that requires browse stop --force + reopen. The deep-link GET ?License_id=... avoids this entirely. If you must POST, do it via in-page fetch() (which does not navigate) rather than the form's native submit.
• Not-found returns 200 OK + the empty form page (~18 KB), not 4xx. Detect by absence of License Type: in the body. Status code alone is not a signal.
• OFFICER rows omit License Status and Expiration Date at the top level. Their status is encoded in the Affiliated Licensed Corporation(s) sub-row (e.g. OFFICER LICENSE EXPIRED AS OF 11/03/09). Don't error if those top-level fields are missing on a License Type: OFFICER record.
• Disciplinary action lives in two places, not one. Clean records show NO DISCIPLINARY ACTION followed by NO OTHER PUBLIC COMMENTS under the Comment: row. Records with active discipline replace the first line with date-stamped entries (e.g. 12/03/25 - REVOKED PER H-03611-FR) and add a Disciplinary or Formal Action Documents: block of PDF filenames (H03611FR_251203_P.pdf). The PDFs are served from https://www2.dre.ca.gov/publicasp/disciplinary/<filename>.pdf — but the lookup page only exposes the bare filenames, so you must construct the URL yourself. Confirmed 2026-05-26: filenames in our trace resolve at that path.
• Pursuant to Business & Professions Code §10083.2(c), some disciplinary information may have been removed from the public record. The header disclaimer states discipline info may still be available on written request. The skill cannot surface what isn't in the response — when reporting "no disciplinary action," note that this reflects only the public record.
• (Above address is marked unreliable in DRE database) is a parenthetical note that appears under the mailing address for some licensees (e.g. license 01974439). It is sibling text, not part of the address — strip it and surface as a separate boolean (address_unreliable: true).
• Date format is two-digit year (MM/DD/YY). Pre-2000 issue dates exist (license 00600964 issued long before 2000), so naïve 20YY expansion can be wrong — but DRE displays only the 2-digit form. Keep the raw MM/DD/YY string and let the caller decide on century resolution; do not auto-expand.
• License IDs are zero-padded 8-digit strings. The endpoint silently coerces shorter numerics (?License_id=1974439 works for 01974439), but always send the canonical zero-padded form — some downstream parsers compare strings, not integers.
• Corporation records can be very large (~75 KB+) when the entity has many DBAs, branches, and officers. Plan for streaming or chunked parsing. The Salespersons list is not inlined — it shows only a count and a RETRIEVE SALESPERSON LIST button that POSTs to a separate endpoint. If you need the full salesperson roster for a corp, that is a follow-up call (out of scope for this skill).
• Search-by-name (POST h_nextstep=SEARCH&LICENSEE_NAME=Smith&CITY_STATE=&LICENSE_ID=) returns a large flat list (~2 MB for common surnames like Smith). Each item is <a href="pplinfo.asp?License_id=XXXXXXXX">XXXXXXXX</a></td> <td> {Name} </td><td>{Type}</td><td>{City}</td> — useful as a discovery step when the caller has only the licensee's name. There is no pagination; the response is one giant <table>.
• There is a "new" lookup at https://pplinfo2.dre.ca.gov/ (referenced in a commented-out <meta refresh> in the page head). At time of writing (2026-05-26) the redirect is disabled and pplinfo2.dre.ca.gov is not a stable alternative — stick with www2.dre.ca.gov/publicasp/pplinfo.asp.
• The <head> of the response varies by code path. The detail-page success response has a minimal <head> (no CSS stylesheet imports, no navigation chrome); the form / not-found response has the full ~14 KB site chrome. This is the cheapest size-based heuristic: detail < 10 KB, not-found ≈ 18 KB.
• No Cache-Control on detail pages (Cache-Control: private). Each request hits the IIS app server. Empirical throughput from us-west-2 to DRE is ~1 req/s sustained without any signs of throttling, but be polite — this is a single-server government site.

Expected Output

Outcome 1 — Active Corporation (LICENSED)

{
  "success": true,
  "license_id": "01527365",
  "licensee_name": "Compass California III, Inc.",
  "license_type": "CORPORATION",
  "license_status": "LICENSED",
  "expiration_date": "02/25/30",
  "issued_date": "02/26/18",
  "mailing_address": "9454 WILSHIRE BLVD #100, BEVERLY HILLS, CA 90212",
  "address_unreliable": false,
  "former_names": [],
  "licensed_officers": [
    { "license_id": "00625769", "name": "Mehringer, Kathy", "expiration_date": "02/25/30", "role": "DESIGNATED OFFICER" },
    { "license_id": "01396547", "name": "Kraemer, Samuel H", "expiration_date": "11/04/29" }
  ],
  "dbas": [
    { "name": "Beach Homes", "period": "ACTIVE AS OF 11/07/2019" },
    { "name": "Coastal Collective Real Estate", "period": "ACTIVE AS OF 06/30/2023" }
  ],
  "branches": [],
  "affiliated_salespersons_count": 1037,
  "disciplinary_actions": [],
  "disciplinary_documents": []
}

Outcome 2 — Revoked Broker with disciplinary action

{
  "success": true,
  "license_id": "01974439",
  "licensee_name": "Cooper, Demetrius Elijah",
  "license_type": "BROKER",
  "license_status": "REVOKED",
  "expiration_date": "11/14/25",
  "issued_date": "11/15/21",
  "mailing_address": "1527 19TH STREET, SUITE 330, BAKERSFIELD, CA 93301",
  "address_unreliable": true,
  "former_names": [],
  "affiliated_corporations": [
    { "license_id": "02165333", "name": "Astronant Inc.", "status": "OFFICER LICENSE REVOKED AS OF 12/03/25" }
  ],
  "disciplinary_actions": [
    "05/21/25 - H-03611 FR",
    "12/03/25 - REVOKED PER H-03611-FR"
  ],
  "disciplinary_documents": [
    "H03611FR_250521_P.pdf",
    "H03611FR_251203_P.pdf"
  ]
}

Outcome 3 — Expired Salesperson (clean record, no responsible broker)

{
  "success": true,
  "license_id": "01780940",
  "licensee_name": "Smith, Apryl Carthan",
  "license_type": "SALESPERSON",
  "license_status": "EXPIRED",
  "expiration_date": "11/07/10",
  "issued_date": "11/08/06",
  "mailing_address": "29223 STARFALL WAY, SAUGUS, CA 91390",
  "address_unreliable": false,
  "former_names": [],
  "responsible_broker": null,
  "disciplinary_actions": [],
  "disciplinary_documents": []
}

Outcome 4 — Active Salesperson with current responsible broker

{
  "success": true,
  "license_id": "01335841",
  "licensee_name": "Haley, Gregory James",
  "license_type": "SALESPERSON",
  "license_status": "LICENSED",
  "expiration_date": "04/13/30",
  "issued_date": "08/07/02",
  "mailing_address": "2249 E POWERS AVE, FRESNO, CA 93720",
  "address_unreliable": false,
  "former_names": [],
  "responsible_broker": {
    "license_id": "02137475",
    "name": "Universal Realty Services, Inc.",
    "address": "1520 SHAW AVE, CLOVIS, CA 93611"
  },
  "disciplinary_actions": [],
  "disciplinary_documents": []
}

Outcome 5 — License ID not found

{
  "success": false,
  "license_id": "99999999",
  "error_reasoning": "License ID not found in DRE database"
}