The certification mark, and how to use it
Passing the assessment is free and always will be. What a certified agent may then license, annually, is a mark they can put on their own website — one that says exactly what we checked, on what date, carries our address, and links back to the page where anyone can confirm it.
It is $149 a year, and it is the only thing on this site an agent can pay us for. It buys a graphic and a set of materials. It buys no referral, no place on a panel, and no position on one — and if that changed, this page would be the first thing we had to rewrite.
Payment alone gets you nothing. The payment link is on the Cusp Certified page, but the media kit, the emblem and your certificate number are sent to you only after you have passed the assessment and after we have looked your license up with the agency that issued it.
The reason is the whole point of the mark: it says a specific thing was checked on a specific date. A payment on its own must never be enough to display it to a person in the middle of a divorce. So the gate is a human verifying a license with a regulator, and the certificate number on every asset is what anyone can check — not the receipt.
Sit the assessment — free, twenty questions Then apply with your license number. Once you are certified the mark is $149 a year, billed annually and cancellable at any time. Everything before it — the training, the assessment, the certification, the verification page and your place on a panel — is free, permanently.
License verified with the state regulator and 20-question assessment passed, 4 September 2026. The Cusp is a fifty-state divorce information service. Not accredited by any body; not offered by or endorsed by the National Association of REALTORS®.
the line underneath is part of it, not optionalThe short version5 points · tap one to jump to it
- How the mark can be checked — The materials are files. A certified agent downloads them and uses them in their own marketing — social posts, an email signature, a listing presentation, print.
- What it says, and what it does not — What happens then, on the same day: the lookup changes to say so against your certificate number, the right to the mark and the letters ends, you come off the panel, and we do not introduce anybody to you again.
- The page it points to — We get a link from every agent’s website — and, more usefully, we get visitors who arrive already trusting the person whose page they just came from.
- How to add it to your site — It is plain HTML: no scripts, no tracking, and nothing at all to load from us.
- If you leave, or we ask you to — Your verification page changes to say you are no longer in the network, with the date, and the mark on your site quietly starts saying that instead.
In this subject 6
How the mark can be checked
The short version5 points · tap one to jump to it
- How the mark can be checked — The materials are files. A certified agent downloads them and uses them in their own marketing — social posts, an email signature, a listing presentation, print.
- What it says, and what it does not — What happens then, on the same day: the lookup changes to say so against your certificate number, the right to the mark and the letters ends, you come off the panel, and we do not introduce anybody to you again.
- The page it points to — We get a link from every agent’s website — and, more usefully, we get visitors who arrive already trusting the person whose page they just came from.
- How to add it to your site — It is plain HTML: no scripts, no tracking, and nothing at all to load from us.
- If you leave, or we ask you to — Your verification page changes to say you are no longer in the network, with the date, and the mark on your site quietly starts saying that instead.
In this subject 6
Because a badge nobody can check is just a picture — which is exactly what we say about every other directory’s badge, so it had better not be true of ours.
The materials are files. A certified agent downloads them and uses them in their own marketing — social posts, an email signature, a listing presentation, print. We are not going to pretend we can reach into somebody’s Instagram post and change it.
So every asset carries two things on its face: a certificate number and the date we checked. Anyone — a client, an attorney, a judge, another agent — can take that number to our lookup and be told, in one step, whether the certification is current, expired, or revoked. We hold the list. The list is the truth, not the graphic.
What that means honestly, because it cuts both ways. A revoked agent can keep a saved image and we cannot stop them, the same as any credential that has ever been printed on anything. What we can do is answer the question when somebody asks it, and the date on the face of the mark is what prompts a careful person to ask. An undated badge is a claim. A dated one with a number is a claim you can test.
What it says, and what it does not
What it means
- This person held an active real estate license in the named state on the date shown, checked by us against the state regulator — not against a screenshot they sent us.
- They passed our assessment — at least sixteen of twenty — against a standard we published before anybody sat it.
- They passed the assessment to earn it. The certification cannot be bought at any price — the annual license to display it can, but only by somebody who has already passed.
What it does not mean
- It is not accredited by anybody. We set the standard, we mark the assessment, and we say so. This course is not offered by or endorsed by the National Association of REALTORS®.
- The license stops being clean. It lapses, is suspended, or picks up an unresolved disciplinary action. We re-check at renewal and whenever anything reaches us in between.
- The mark is used without a current license to display it, or altered, or shown without its date.
- The certification is misrepresented — described as accreditation, as a recommendation, as a rating, or as covering anything beyond a divorce real estate sale.
- A client we introduced tells us it went badly, and what they describe is serious. We will ask every referred client at seven days and again at six months, and we will ask them rather than you.
- An introduction is ignored. Somebody in the worst year of their life was handed your name and you did not call them back.
- It is not a recommendation of their work. We checked a license and marked twenty questions. Neither of those makes somebody good at their job.
- It is not permanent. We re-check each license at its own renewal date and the mark reflects the last check, with its date on it.
It can be taken away, and the grounds are published so that it cannot be taken away arbitrarily. Certification is revoked, not merely expired, for any of the following:
What happens then, on the same day: the lookup changes to say so against your certificate number, the right to the mark and the letters ends, you come off the panel, and we do not introduce anybody to you again. Continuing to display the mark after that is a misuse of ours, and anyone who checks the number will be told.
We publish this because a credential nobody can lose is not a credential. If we are wrong about something, tell us — we correct things in public, with dates, and we have done it before.
The certification is earned and free. What is licensed is the right to display it. Those are different things and the difference is the whole arrangement.
Free, permanently, to anyone who passes: the certification itself, the verification page, and the plain factual statement of it in your own words — “certified in divorce real estate by The Cusp”, “I passed The Cusp’s assessment”. That is a true thing about you and we would not stop you saying it if we could. Nobody needs our permission to state a fact. The one condition: include a link to thecusp.app, ideally to your verification page, and do not use our emblem, badge or graphics, which come only with the media kit.
Licensed annually, and not otherwise permitted: the badge, the certification mark, the media kit, and the post-nominal letters DPCC — Divorce Professional, Cusp Certified. Those are ours. Using them without a current license is not allowed, and the verification page is what makes that enforceable: the day a license lapses, the page it points to says so, on the agent’s own website, without us having to ask anybody for anything.
The letters never travel alone on the mark itself. Wherever the credential is displayed rather than abbreviated, the discipline is named with it: Divorce Professional, Cusp Certified — Real Estate. We certify what an agent knows about a divorce sale. We do not certify law, tax, mediation or therapy, and the credential should never be capable of being read as though we did.
We used to say there were no letters after anyone’s name. We changed our mind, and we would rather record that than quietly edit it. The old position existed because letters are the standard trick of the designation business — pay a fee, receive an acronym, imply an expertise nobody checked. What changed our mind is that these letters sit on top of a license we verified at the source and an assessment somebody actually passed. What has not changed, and will not: the certification cannot be bought at any price. Only the right to display it can, and only by somebody who has already earned it.
The page it points to
Every certified agent gets their own page on this site. That page — not the badge — is the actual claim, and it carries:
- Name and brokerage. Not the county — which county an agent covers is ours and theirs, not a fact we publish.
- License state and number, the date we checked it, and where we checked it.
- The date they completed the training.
- A plain statement that The Cusp receives a referral fee if it introduces a client to this agent and a sale completes — because a mark like this is an endorsement, we have a financial relationship with the person displaying it, and the honest thing and the legally required thing happen to be the same thing here.
- And, if they leave the network, that they are no longer in it, with the date.
The agent gets a credible, checkable mark on their own marketing that almost nobody else has. We get a link from every agent’s website — and, more usefully, we get visitors who arrive already trusting the person whose page they just came from.
That is a better introduction to this site than any advertisement we could buy, and it costs both of us nothing.
How to add it to your site
Paste this where you want it, with your own verification URL and the date from your page. It is plain HTML: no scripts, no tracking, and nothing at all to load from us. The mark is drawn in the code itself, so it cannot break if we ever move a file, and it works in an email signature and offline. The link is the part that matters — it points at your verification page, which is what makes the mark checkable.
<a href="https://thecusp.app/verify/"
rel="noopener" style="display:inline-flex;align-items:center;gap:10px;
text-decoration:none;border:1px solid #e4e0ee;border-radius:12px;
background:#fff;padding:9px 15px 9px 12px;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif">
<svg width="26" height="26" viewBox="0 0 26 26" aria-hidden="true"
style="flex:0 0 26px">
<circle cx="13" cy="13" r="13" fill="#5b46c9"></circle>
<text x="13" y="18" text-anchor="middle" fill="#fff"
font-family="Georgia,serif" font-size="14"
font-weight="700">C</text>
</svg>
<span>
<span style="display:block;font-size:12.5px;font-weight:800;color:#1a1730">
Certified in Divorce Real Estate</span>
<span style="display:block;font-size:10.5px;font-weight:700;color:#7a7490">
by The Cusp · TheCusp.app · 4 Sep 2026</span>
</span>
</a>
<p style="font-size:11.5px;line-height:1.5;color:#7a7490;max-width:420px;
font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;margin:6px 0 0">
License verified with the state regulator and 20-question assessment passed,
4 September 2026. The Cusp is a fifty-state divorce information service.
Not accredited by any body; not offered by or endorsed by the
National Association of REALTORS®.
</p>If your website builder will not take HTML, tell us and we will send you a version that works with it. This should take three minutes and we would rather do it for you than have you give up on it.
- Do not shorten the name. It is “Certified in Divorce Real Estate by The Cusp”, and the last three words are what keep it honest. “Certified Divorce Real Estate Professional” implies an industry body that does not exist, and that is the version we will ask you to remove.
- Do not remove the date. The date is what makes it a fact rather than a claim.
- Do not use it without the link, or without the line of text underneath. A screenshot of the mark is what we tell readers to distrust, and the basis line is not decoration — a seal that does not say what it rests on overclaims by default, and a clickable logo does not fix that.
- Do not imply we recommend you, rank you, or vouch for your work. We checked your license and you did the training. Say that; it is more than anyone else can say.
If you leave, or we ask you to
Nothing dramatic happens. Your verification page changes to say you are no longer in the network, with the date, and the mark on your site quietly starts saying that instead. We will not ask you to take anything down and we will not send anybody a letter.
Either of us can end it at any time, in writing. Referral agreements already signed on clients you were introduced to survive, and you keep those fees.