Does managing rentals for other people take a broker's license?

All three people were describing something real, and which one applies to you depends on your state.

The common rule is that leasing property, collecting rent, and negotiating lease terms on behalf of someone else for compensation are brokerage activities, and doing them requires a real estate license held by or under a broker. In most states that means you either hold a broker license yourself or work as a salesperson under a broker who does. A handful of states have a separate property management license or permit with its own narrower exam, and a few have no license requirement for residential management at all. Your state real estate commission website spells out which one you're in, and that's the only source I'd trust on it.

The employee exemption is real too, and narrower than it sounds. Most states exempt a salaried on-site manager who works for the owner of that specific property. Once you're managing for multiple owners for a fee, you're outside it.

Costs run roughly $500 to $2,000 to get licensed, counting pre-license coursework, the exam, fingerprinting and the license itself, plus continuing education later.

On insurance, general liability and errors and omissions are the two you'd carry before your first door, and E&O for property management is written differently than agent E&O, so tell the broker what you're actually doing. There's a third piece people forget: most states require client money to sit in a separate trust or escrow account with strict record keeping, and commingling it with operating money is one of the fastest ways to lose a license. Set that account up before you take a dollar of anyone's rent.

Worth calling the commission rather than reading the website, in my experience of trying. The statutes get amended and the FAQ page doesn't always keep up.

Add a fidelity bond or crime policy to that insurance list. You'll be holding security deposits, and an owner whose deposit money walks out the door with a bookkeeper doesn't care that you had E&O.

If you're going to coordinate repairs, ask your carrier specifically how they treat vendor selection. Sending an unlicensed handyman to do electrical and having the tenant get hurt is the claim that finds the gap in a general liability policy.

The trust account thing surprised me when I looked at my state. A separate account is only the start. You also owe a monthly three-way reconciliation between the bank statement, the ledger and the individual owner balances. That's real bookkeeping labor from door one.

Doing that reconciliation by hand in a spreadsheet works up to about 20 doors and becomes a liability after that. Budget for the software before you think you need it.

Different angle: if you ever want to sell the management company, the license usually sits with a person and not the business. Buyers care a lot about whether the designated broker is staying.

@plumb the licensing is the easy part honestly. Five years in and the thing that actually gates growth is whether you can produce an owner statement on the third of the month, every month, without anyone chasing you. Get the accounting workflow right before you get clever about anything else.