There is no single "Canada MLS".
Listing data lives in many dozens of regional MLS Systems, each run by its own real estate board and loosely federated under CREA.
Canada's residential listing data sits in many dozens of regional MLS Systems, each one owned and operated by its own real estate board or association. TRREB runs Toronto's. CREB is behind Calgary's. Greater Vancouver REALTORS (GVR) runs Metro Vancouver's.
The Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) is the federation those boards belong to, not an MLS operator sitting above them. Nobody in Canada logs into a national database, because there isn't one.
CREA created the Data Distribution Facility (DDF), widely dated to 2012, so its members could send MLS listing content out to multiple websites from one place. DDF sits on top of each board's local system rather than replacing it. CREA's own commissioned whitepaper on Canadian MLS frames it as two data transfer protocols working side by side: Internet Data Exchange (IDX), which the local boards operate, and REALTOR.ca's DDF, which is national.
The same whitepaper describes how the national layer gets assembled. CREA gathers listing and member data from the boards through its Data Load platform, then publishes the compiled result through both REALTOR.ca and DDF. The public portal and the syndication facility are two outputs of one pipeline, not one feeding the other.
That distinction changes what the word "MLS" means depending on who says it. To a REALTOR inside a board, it means the board's own system, the one they work in every day. To a site owner trying to publish Canadian listings, "getting MLS data" almost always means going through DDF, going direct to a board, or doing both for different parts of the country, and the two routes work differently enough that the choice comes first.
The national layer sitting on top of them is CREA's Data Distribution Facility (DDF), a permission-based syndication service built from six listing distribution channels.
Feeding it is mandatory for CREA member boards across most of those channels, but each brokerage decides for itself whether to opt its listings in, and that brokerage-level gate is what actually decides whether a given listing reaches your site.
So your first decision isn't which MLS, it's DDF versus a direct board feed from TRREB, CREB, GVR, or Quebec's separate system on Centris.
MLS Import connects over the RESO Web API, so confirm your chosen route delivers one, then it turns that feed into native, indexable WordPress posts on your own domain, synced hourly, at $49 a month after a 30-day free trial. No iframe.
DDF is a national, permission-based syndication facility, and CREA's own DDF Policy and Rules define it as six listing distribution channels: the National Shared Pool, National Franchisor Pool, Franchisor Direct Feed, Member Website Feed, Real Estate Advertising Websites and Partner Websites. Two of those matter for a WordPress build. If you want broad reach across many brokerages and many boards, you want the National Shared Pool.
If you're building a site for one agent or one brokerage showing only their own inventory, you want the Member Website Feed. The other four channels serve franchisors, advertising sites and CREA's own partner arrangements, and a typical agent or brokerage site never touches them.
Here's the part almost everybody gets backwards. Participation in four of those channels is mandatory for every CREA member board, and mandatory for the other two unless the board gives its members a facility CREA judges comparable. So the big boards feed DDF rather than sitting outside it.
What's optional is the brokerage layer: each brokerage inside those boards decides for itself whether to opt its listings in. That's why DDF's coverage is a percentage of national inventory rather than a simple in or out per board.
If your site targets one metro market, Toronto or Calgary or Metro Vancouver: DDF carries the brokerages that opted into the national pool. The board's own feed carries the brokerages that signed that board's data agreement.
Both routes are opt-in gated, so neither is complete, but the board's own participating inventory is the deeper of the two for a single market. For a site whose whole value is completeness in one city, that difference is the deciding factor.
The tradeoff is paperwork. One DDF signup covers many boards at once; the direct route means a separate application, agreement and compliance review with each board you want. Budget for that per board, not once.
And Quebec is the one place where there's no DDF option to compare against: Quebec's data runs entirely outside CREA, through Centris, so a Quebec build is its own project with its own rules from day one.
DDF access runs through two parties, and you probably aren't both of them. The first is a CREA member, a REALTOR or brokerage already participating in a DDF channel. The second is a technology provider, defined in CREA's rules as a company that has signed a data access agreement with CREA to operate a website on a participant's behalf.
A site owner who isn't a CREA member either works with a registered provider or registers as one on the member's behalf. There is no way to buy a DDF feed as an outsider, no public data plan, no self-serve key.
The member's opt-in also defines what the feed contains, so the channel chosen in step one decides whether your site gets one brokerage's listings or a national pool. Get that right before anyone writes code: changing it later means going back through the member and back through CREA.
On the technical side, third-party developer documentation puts DDF's Web API at ddfapi.realtor.ca, REST-based, using Bearer-token authentication, with separate endpoints for property, member, office, open house and media data. CREA keeps its own API reference at ddfapi-docs.realtor.ca, so check that once you hold credentials. It's the RESO Web API pattern, the same standard TRREB delivers through PropTx, so a developer coming from a US MLS will recognize the shape. Fields arrive aligned to the RESO Data Dictionary, so a status or a property type means the same thing in a DDF response as in a board feed on the same standard.
The brokerage opts in to a DDF distribution channel through the DDF dashboard at member.realtor.ca: the National Shared Pool for broad multi-board reach, or the Member Website Feed for its own listings.
The member engages a technology provider, in-house or outside, to build the integration. CREA's rules require the opt-in first: participants must opt in through the DDF dashboard before retaining a technology provider.
The technology provider registers with CREA and signs the required Data Access Agreement.
New technology providers pay a one-time $1,500 CAD onboarding fee. Ongoing billing is covered in the fees section below.
Once approved, the provider receives Bearer-token credentials for the DDF Web API.
Those credentials go into MLS Import, which syncs the feed hourly into native, indexable WordPress posts on your own domain.
If your brokerage hasn't opted in, CREA's rules give that choice to brokerages, not to individual agents, so an agent whose firm has declined can't complete that opt-in alone and has to take it to their broker.
One rule runs the opposite way to what most people expect. CREA's rules bar the participant from disclosing their own DDF credentials, usernames and passwords included, to a technology provider or anyone else. The provider works under its own agreement and its own access, invoiced separately by feed count. The obligations that come with the feed, the display requirements and the 24-hour refresh rule below, sit with the participant operating the website, not with whoever wrote the integration.
That figure is one data vendor's estimate, not a number CREA publishes. Coverage varies by market, and a national average tells you nothing about whether the brokerages in your city opted in.
You can check it for your own market: pull a sample once you're credentialed and compare the count for your target city against what REALTOR.ca shows the same day. That check only works after you've paid the onboarding fee and signed the agreement, which is the wrong order for a decision this size. So ask the question earlier. Put participation in your target market on the list you take to CREA and to each board at first contact, before you commit.
No board sits outside DDF. Brokerages decline it, one at a time, for their own reasons, and the total of those decisions is what you see in the feed. So a big board is represented in DDF and undercounted in it at the same time, rather than excluded from it. If your site needs a board's full participating inventory rather than its opted-in slice, the direct board route in the table below is the answer, not more patience with DDF.
One limit doesn't move no matter how many brokerages opt in: DDF carries active listings only. There's no historical or sold data in it. A "recently sold" page, a comparables tool or a market-stats dashboard cannot be built from DDF alone, and that's architectural, not a gap that closes over time.
If sold history is central to what you're building, plan a second data source for it now rather than finding the hole after launch. Centris has the same limit on the Quebec side, so switching provinces doesn't solve it either.
Quebec is genuinely outside DDF. Quebec's boards, Montreal and Quebec City among them, left CREA at the end of 2013, and in January 2014 CREA began removing out-of-province brokers' Quebec listings from REALTOR.ca over a provincial licensing dispute, as Real Estate Magazine reported at the time. Quebec listings run through Centris instead, and access there is granted brokerage by brokerage.
Four routes cover most Canadian projects. Three are boards you apply to directly; the fourth is a separate system with a different access model entirely. None of the three boards lists a developer fee on its public data pages, so treat the contact column as your actual next step.
Worth deciding before you start: going direct pays for the extra process when your site's value depends on one market being complete, and it usually doesn't when you're covering several provinces at once.
Toronto Regional Real Estate Board
Access route: Direct data agreement with TRREB, delivered through PropTx, its technology subsidiary. Start at TRREB's IDX datafeed page and the PropTx data syndication and agreement system.
Technology: RESO Web API, carrying listings for the brokerages that have completed TRREB's data agreement. TRREB's older IDX iframe product carries a discontinuation notice on TRREB's own site, so build on the API. The 2025 migration renamed hundreds of field values ("Condo Apt" became "Condo Apartment"), and integrations written against the old names return zero results until they're remapped.
Contact and notes: [email protected] or 416-443-8131. TRREB does not publish a fee for outside-developer access, so ask for the current schedule when you make contact. CREA's 2022 whitepaper reports TRREB spending roughly $40 million a year to deliver its MLS System, exclusive of legal and compliance matters, which is its own infrastructure cost rather than anything charged to a developer.
Calgary Real Estate Board
Access route: CREB states on its own About page that it is a founding partner of Pillar 9 Technologies, providing REALTORS access to a province-wide MLS System. A developer targeting Calgary is realistically targeting the Alberta provincial system rather than a CREB-only feed.
Technology: Confirm the current feed format and vendor requirements with Pillar 9 directly before you scope the build.
Contact and notes: Route through Pillar 9's own vendor-access process, with CREB as the member-side contact. No published developer fee. Alberta listings also reach DDF through brokerage opt-in, so check whether the national pool already covers enough of Calgary for your build before you start a second application.
Greater Vancouver REALTORS, formerly REBGV
Access route: GVR runs a vendor-approval process: an introduction to its compliance department, a signed contract, a test feed, a compliance review of the finished site, then production access. Expect the compliance review to be the long pole, and note that it looks at your finished pages rather than a form.
Technology: RESO Web API. A reciprocal data-sharing arrangement with the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board (FVREB) and the Chilliwack and District Real Estate Board (CADREB) has let one connection reach all three board areas. That arrangement predates the 2024 rebrand, so confirm it still stands when you apply.
Contact and notes: Start through GVR's compliance and vendor-access process. REBGV took the name Greater Vancouver REALTORS on February 12, 2024, and older documentation still says REBGV throughout. Confirm each board's own sequence with that board rather than assuming it matches this one.
Centris
Access route: Outside CREA and DDF entirely. Quebec's boards left CREA at the end of 2013, and CREA began removing out-of-province brokers' Quebec listings from its national portal in January 2014 following a dispute over provincial licensing rules.
Technology: Access is per-brokerage: authorization comes from each individual Quebec brokerage through Centris rather than from one board-wide or province-wide feed. Confirm the feed format with Centris or the brokerage before you scope a Quebec build, since MLS Import connects over the RESO Web API.
Contact and notes: Approach the Quebec brokerages whose listings you need, through Centris. Centris carries active listings only, with no historical or sold data, the same limit DDF has.
Beyond the credentials themselves, CREA's DDF Policy and Rules attach two standing obligations to the website rather than to the feed. Participants running national pool websites and member websites have to refresh at least once every 24 hours, and any listing content that is no longer current after a refresh has to come off the site.
MLS Import's hourly sync clears the refresh floor with room to spare and removes listings that drop out of the feed, so that pair of obligations lands on the pipeline rather than on somebody remembering to check.
Neither CREA, nor DDF, nor TRREB's PropTx publishes a RESO certification tier. What they document is a RESO Web API with Data Dictionary aligned fields, and that is the part that matters for an import, because it means field names arrive the same way every time instead of a developer re-reading somebody's proprietary export every quarter.
Standards adoption is easy to claim and expensive to do, so the spending line is the useful signal. CREA's 2022 whitepaper reports just under $18 million spent in 2021 and just under $20 million budgeted for 2022 across REALTOR.ca and DDF combined, and describes a full rebuild of the DDF software, front end and back end, plus a rewrite of the Data Load platform that gathers listing and member data from boards specifically to respect RESO open standards. Those are 2021 and 2022 figures, not current-year spend.
What that buys you as a builder is field stability. It also means the mapping work you do for DDF mostly carries over if you later add a direct board feed on the same standard, which is the practical reason the DDF-first-then-board sequence in the decision section costs less than it looks.
CREA's DDF Policy and Rules, revised January 2024, is the governing document, and its display and participation requirements are worded differently from typical US MLS IDX rules.
Read them before you design the listing template, not after, because several of them dictate layout rather than configuration. Watch the scoping as you go: most bind every DDF-fed site, and two bind National Pool Websites specifically, which is the channel you land on if you took the National Shared Pool.
A "Powered by REALTOR.ca" badge is required, minimum 90 pixels wide at a 1:1 ratio, linking through to the matching REALTOR.ca listing.
The listing brokerage's name displays alongside the listing content, in text large enough to read easily and without making a consumer click a link to find it.
CREA's watermark remains on listing photos. Your gallery, lightbox and any image processing you run have to leave it intact.
Every page of a national pool or member website carries an MLS and REALTOR trademark statement plus the controlling participant's name and brokerage logo. That's a template job, not a one-page job.
National Pool Websites must gate listing content behind a click-wrap or enhanced browse-wrap agreement carrying CREA's mandated text on trademark ownership, liability, copyright and who operates the site.
No participant may run more than ten websites on DDF-sourced content, and that content can't power a website through which a member provides online brokerage services to consumers.
One more rule is scoped the same way. On National Pool Websites, participants can't let consumers write comments or reviews about a particular listing, or link out to such comments. If a review or ratings layer was in your plan, that's the rule that stops it.
These are DDF rules and they bind the participant operating the website, not the plugin and not the developer. A direct TRREB, CREB or GVR feed comes with that board's own display rules instead, a separate rulebook and a separate compliance review. MLS Import handles the sync cadence, the field mapping and the removal of listings that drop out of the feed. The badge, the brokerage name, the watermark and the terms of use are template decisions, so handle them at build time when they cost an hour rather than at review time when they cost a resubmission.
Two separate billing authorities, and conflating them is how budgets go wrong. CREA charges the technology provider for DDF access. A board charges separately for direct access to its own feed. Neither covers the other, and a project using both pays both.
There's a third line nobody invoices you for at signup, too: the member's own board and MLS dues, which the REALTOR or brokerage already pays whether or not a website exists.
The full tier chart sits on that same technology-provider pricing page, and CREA doesn't allow a provider to prepay for a full year. Read the current chart there before you quote a client an annual number.
Board-level fees for TRREB, CREB and GVR direct access aren't listed on any of their public data pages. The contact column in the routing table above is where you get a figure, straight from the board.
The one number on this page you can budget against today is ours. MLS Import is $49 a month after a 30-day free trial, one plan, no tiers, no per-listing charge, no setup fee. That covers the WordPress side: the connection, the import filters, the import tasks and the hourly sync. It does not cover CREA's fee, a board's fee, or MLS membership itself, and no plugin can, because those credentials have to be issued to a member.
The Competition Bureau of Canada obtained a court order in October 2024 to investigate whether CREA's commission rules and its REALTOR Cooperation Policy affect competition, including whether they make it harder for alternative listing services to compete.
CREA confirmed the investigation publicly the same month, stating that it believes its rules and policies are pro-competitive and pro-consumer.
Court documents reported by CBC News describe the Cooperation Policy itself, in force since the beginning of 2024, as requiring residential listings to be added to an MLS System within three days of being publicly marketed through a yard sign, flyer or online promotion. The same court documents, per CBC's account, argue the policy favours larger brokerages.
Nothing here is resolved, and none of it changes how DDF or a board feed works today. Worth tracking if you're building a business on Canadian listing data: the same cooperation rules set how quickly a listing has to reach an MLS System, and therefore how quickly it can reach your feed.
TRREB's legacy IDX iframe product now carries a "will be discontinued" notice on TRREB's own site, and its listing data is delivered through the RESO Web API by PropTx, TRREB's technology subsidiary. If you're scoping a Toronto build today, PropTx's API is the route. The older iframe product is being discontinued.
The migration through 2025 came with a detail worth building around. Hundreds of field values were renamed in the move: "Att/Row/Twnhouse" became "Att/Row/Townhouse", "Condo Apt" became "Condo Apartment", and so on across the dictionary. Applications written against the old value names didn't error out when the switch happened.
They returned zero results, silently, until somebody remapped them. Build on a Data Dictionary aligned field set instead of hard-coding value strings from an old integration, and check the search filters on any inherited Toronto site.
The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver took the name Greater Vancouver REALTORS (GVR) effective February 12, 2024. Real Estate Magazine reported the announcement on February 9, and the organization operates under the GVR name today.
The practical consequence: most searches and older paperwork still use REBGV, so expect two names for one organization for a while yet.
The access process was modernized alongside the rebrand, so confirm you're following current steps rather than a pre-2024 process, and confirm the reciprocal arrangement with the Fraser Valley and Chilliwack boards still stands. That one decides whether your Metro Vancouver site reaches one board area or three off a single connection.
No. Canada has many dozens of regional MLS Systems, each run by its own real estate board or association and federated under CREA.
CREA's DDF is a national syndication layer sitting on top of them, not the underlying database. MLS Import connects to whichever feed your market actually needs.
The Data Distribution Facility is a national, permission-based syndication service that lets CREA member boards and brokerages send MLS listing content to websites from one place.
CREA compiles board data and publishes it through both REALTOR.ca and DDF. MLS Import turns a DDF feed into native WordPress posts on your own domain.
A brokerage opts in to a DDF distribution channel first, through the dashboard at member.realtor.ca.
It then engages a technology provider, or registers as one, to build the integration, and CREA issues API credentials to that provider. MLS Import is the WordPress half once credentials exist.
No. Board participation is mandatory but brokerage opt-in is optional, so one data vendor's estimate puts DDF at roughly 60 to 65% of active national listings.
Quebec sits outside it entirely. MLS Import connects to a DDF feed or a direct board feed, whichever gives your market the coverage it needs.
TRREB delivers listing data through the RESO Web API via its technology subsidiary, PropTx, rather than the older IDX iframe product, which carries a discontinuation notice on TRREB's own site.
Start at TRREB's IDX datafeed page. Once you hold credentials, MLS Import syncs the feed hourly into native posts.
No. Quebec's listings run through Centris, entirely outside CREA's national system, following Quebec's boards leaving CREA at the end of 2013.
Authorization there is granted brokerage by brokerage rather than as one province-wide feed, so a Quebec project is scoped separately from a DDF build with MLS Import.
No. Current access for CREA's DDF and for TRREB through PropTx both run on the RESO Web API, the modern standard used across Canada's major boards.
MLS Import connects over that same standard, so no legacy feed type is involved.
New DDF technology providers pay a one-time $1,500 CAD onboarding fee, with ongoing costs invoiced quarterly on a tiered basis by the number of data feeds operated.
CREA publishes the tier chart on its technology-provider pricing page. MLS Import is a separate subscription at $49 a month after a 30-day free trial.
IDX is a board's own local system for reciprocal display between its member brokerages. DDF is CREA's national layer sitting on top of those local systems, with its own channels, policy and display rules.
MLS Import can pull from either one, depending on which feed you hold credentials for.
Yes. MLS Import is a standalone WordPress plugin that syncs a DDF or direct board feed hourly into native, indexable posts on your own domain.
It works with any theme, with deeper native integration for WpResidence, WpEstate, Houzez and Real Homes, and it runs on the RESO Web API.
Credentials come from CREA or from a board, never from us. Once you hold them, MLS Import handles the WordPress side.
Ask four things at first contact: the access terms, the fee, the timeline, and what coverage looks like in your target market. That last one decides whether the direct route is worth the paperwork, and it's the one you can't answer for yourself. Get it in writing before you scope the build.
Building for more than one market? Every MLS we have written up is listed in the MLS guides index.
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