Protected Statuses is the one setting that overrules everything else about deletion. A property whose status appears in that list is never removed by the daily reconciliation pass, even when the listing has gone from the MLS entirely.
It lives on each import task, under Import Parameters, next to Select Status. The two are often confused and they do opposite jobs.
The difference between the two lists
- Select Status is the scope of the task. It decides which listings are imported, and it decides whether a listing still in the MLS is kept when its status changes.
- Protected Statuses is an exemption. It decides which properties survive when the listing behind them is no longer in the feed at all.
A status can appear in both, and often should. Putting Closed in Select Status imports and keeps closed listings while the MLS still publishes them. Putting Closed in Protected Statuses keeps those properties on the day the MLS stops publishing them.
What the wizard sets for you
A task created by the setup wizard starts with Active in Select Status, and with Active, Active Under Contract, Coming Soon and Pending in Protected Statuses.
That default is deliberately cautious. It means a property still marked active on your site is never deleted for having dropped out of the feed, which protects against a partial feed or a temporary gap in your MLS data. The trade off is that a listing which genuinely disappears while still marked active stays on the site until you remove it or its status changes.
If old listings never seem to go away, open the task and read Protected Statuses before anything else. Protection wins over every other rule, so a status left in that list explains the behaviour on its own.
Choosing what to protect
- Protect closed listings when you want a sold history that outlives the feed. This is the most common reason to change the setting.
- Protect nothing when the site should be a live mirror of the MLS and nothing else. Every property then goes as soon as its listing leaves the feed.
- Leave the active statuses protected on a market you cannot afford to have thin out during an MLS outage. It costs you some stale listings and buys you certainty.
- Do not protect a status you also want removed on change, such as protecting
Pendingwhile expecting pending listings to disappear. Protection applies whether or not the listing is still in the feed.
The rule you cannot switch off
Beyond your list, one protection is always active: a property whose status cannot be read is kept, and the reason is written to the delete log. A status can be unreadable because the taxonomy mapping changed, because a theme relabelled the term, or because the field was never imported.
The reason the plugin behaves this way is that every mass deletion incident we have investigated started with an unreadable status being treated as grounds for removal. A read that fails proves nothing about the listing, so it can never justify a delete.
The status names in both lists come from your own MLS, so use the values your feed publishes rather than the ones you would expect. A protection typed as Sold on a board that publishes Closed protects nothing at all.
Frequently asked questions
Does changing Protected Statuses affect listings already imported?
Yes. The daily pass reads the task’s current settings each time it runs, so the next run applies the new list to properties that task already owns. There is no need to delete and re-import.
What protects a property whose import task was deleted?
Nothing. With no task, there are no status rules to consult: the property is kept while its listing stays in the feed and removed once it leaves. Keep the task if you want its listings governed.
Can I protect one specific property rather than a whole status?
Not through this setting, which works by status. To keep one listing permanently, recreate it as a manual property with no MLS identifier, which puts it outside reconciliation entirely.
Do protected properties still get updated?
Only while the listing is in the feed. Once it is gone the property is frozen with its last imported values, and its photos stop loading when the MLS stops serving them.
Related
- How daily reconciliation works
- Closed and off market listings
- Controlling which listings are imported
- Import History and the activity log
Tell us what you want kept and what you want removed, and we will tell you which status belongs in which list.