Noob questions about what to expect from a web developer

My property company is thinking about hiring an outside web developer to create, host, and manage several websites for our properties. The contract would be for one year, and the CMS would be an in-house system they have built. But I’m curious on a couple possible scenarios:

1. What if, after 1 year, we want to use a different company to host and manage the site. Will this be possible? Or—due to the in-house CMS-- would we obligated to use the original company to manage these sites in the future? Obviously we would like the flexibility to move/transfer/switch in the future. I’m just not sure how to handle that now to provide for that in the future.

2. What if, in the future, we would like to create a website for a new property. We’d like to contract another company to carry this out, but have the new site match the theme/layout/branding of the existing sites. Would we have access to any necessary templates from the original company to create these new sites? Is this something I should be very clear up-front about with any contracts we sign?

We obviously don’t want to get into a situation where a company has us by the balls, so to speak. I’m sure these are situations that many companies have found themselves in before. I’d just like to know what I can do to ensure we don’t fall into such beginner pitfalls.

FYI the will give us training on how to make basic edits to the websites (editing text, images, etc).

Thanks in advance.

Epic visual tool

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