A seller calls you on a Tuesday. She says her neighbor’s house is in the MLS, she saw the photos on her agent’s screen, and it’s not on your website. You open your import settings, run the sync again, and nothing changes. You start writing a support ticket.
Wait before you send it. There’s a good chance nothing is broken.
A listing can be real, current, and visible to every broker in your MLS, and still be correctly absent from public IDX websites. Two things decide whether a listing reaches your pages. Neither of them is set by your website or your plugin. Both live in the MLS record.
Getting this wrong costs you twice. You spend an afternoon hunting a bug that isn’t there. Then you tell the seller their listing is stuck in a technical problem, when their own marketing choice is what keeps it off public sites for now.
Boards are writing this rule down more plainly than they used to, and several now give the seller more say in it. Your board’s version decides what your website is allowed to show.
Not allowed out, or not arriving
On your screen these look the same. The listing is missing and the page you expected is not there. Underneath they are different situations, and only one is yours.
The first one is permission. Before your feed sends you anything, the MLS asks whether this listing may go to your IDX feed at all, and it answers from the listing status and the seller’s marketing choices. You don’t set that, and your plugin doesn’t set it. When the answer is no, the listing never reaches your site, so your import has nothing to fail at. MLS Import brings in what your authorized RESO Web API feed returns, and it can’t add a listing the MLS doesn’t send.
The second one is breakage, and that half is yours. Expired credentials, a task filter that excludes the city or the property type, a paused sync, a field that never got mapped. These leave a different mark. A broken import usually hits many listings at once, or it stops all of them at a timestamp you can read.
One listing missing while the rest of your feed updated this morning points at permission, not at your setup. Your website is supposed to see less than your MLS terminal does. HousingWire notes that in one system, days on market and price adjustments from the pre-launch period stay in the internal MLS database and off public sites once the listing goes active.
Three checks before you open a ticket
Run these in order. Each one happens in the MLS, not WordPress.
- Read the listing’s status. If it’s Coming Soon, an office exclusive, or any other pre-active status your board uses, find out what that status is allowed to do. One board’s pre-active status shares a listing with members only, with no syndication to third-party sites (Propmodo).
- Read the seller’s IDX choice on that record. Where a board offers the choice, it belongs to the seller, one listing at a time. Your broker or MLS support desk can tell you where that field sits.
- Open a listing that’s Active and definitely permitted. If that one is on your site with today’s price and photos, your import is running.
If all three checks pass and the listing is still missing, the ticket is worth writing, and now you can write a good one. Name the status, the seller’s IDX setting, and the date of your last successful import. That ticket gets answered in one reply instead of five.
What it looks like when a board writes the rule down
Northwest MLS in Washington State has just put its version in writing, and it is worth reading even if you work nowhere near it. On September 4, 2026 it started a listing status called First Look. The NWMLS announcement says every property in that status “must be timely submitted to NWMLS and accessible to all 30,000+ member brokers”, and that sellers and listing brokers “may publicly market the property in First Look for up to 21 days while preparing the property for Active status launch.”
A third rule decides what a website shows. Sellers, NWMLS writes, “can decide if a First Look listing is published on thousands of Internet Data Exchange (IDX) websites.”
The listing is in the MLS. Every member broker in the state can see it. The seller decides separately whether it travels to IDX websites. HousingWire reported the same split: sellers get a choice about showings and a choice about whether their property appears in IDX feeds. Real Estate News reported that Compass and NWMLS settled a 16-month lawsuit, and First Look was the settlement term that made it possible.
Your board may be next
Propmodo reports that The CLAW, an MLS in Southern California, revised its IDX policy in May 2026 and created an MLS Exclusive status. That status lets agents share a listing with members only, without syndication to third-party sites, and it holds back days on market and price history until the property sells. Propmodo also notes that Bright MLS, one of the largest, has flexible pre-marketing rules.
State law is moving the other way at the same time. Propmodo reports that Connecticut was the first state to pass a bill requiring listings to be publicly and widely available, and that New York has similar legislation moving through its legislature.
So the answer for your board can change while your import keeps running as it did last month. Nobody sends you an email about it.
Ask your MLS two questions this week, before a seller asks you. Which statuses in our system are allowed on IDX? Where does the seller’s IDX choice appear on the listing record? Write both answers down somewhere your team can read them. The next time a listing is missing from your site, you’ll know whether it’s yours to fix.
Four things worth your time
What three sites built from one day’s listings
Three unrelated sites published MLS-derived local content on September 19 instead of another market update. SellInBoston compared Chelsea and Everett on asking prices pulled from its live feed that morning. Nevada Real Estate Group read the association fee field and the public remarks across active Las Vegas area listings and built a no HOA inventory map organized by ZIP. Langley.AI worked through its full active inventory, rechecked the shortlist against the live feed, and published fifteen listings worth a second look. None of these needed a special feed. They needed listings living on the site as content rather than inside a search widget.
Read more: Chelsea vs Everett · Las Vegas neighborhoods with no HOA · The Fifteen
Your import isn’t a fact checker
HousingWire’s September 7 piece traces where a wrong number starts. Square footage is often pulled from tax assessor records or carried forward from an older listing and accepted on good faith, so one error travels from record to listing to listing with nobody re-measuring. Regulators have stopped treating that as harmless. The Real Estate Council of Ontario issued four discipline decisions in spring 2026 against agents who advertised lot size or square footage without verifying it. Troubleshoot in this order instead. Source MLS, API response, field mapping, WordPress property. If the first three agree, the correction belongs upstream and your import did its job.
Read more: HousingWire
Fraud is moving upstream of your website
ALTA’s study of 245 title professionals, released September 14, found 59 percent had seen at least one seller impersonation attempt during 2025, against 28 percent in the 2024 study. NAR covered the findings the same day. On September 18, South Central Wisconsin MLS named listing fraud, account takeover and seller impersonation as threats to MLS integrity. MLS Import does not verify seller identity, and no import plugin does. What it has to do is carry a removal through. So check yours: take a listing your MLS withdrew last month, search your own site for that address, and see whether the property page still loads with its photos and its price.
Read more: NAR · ALTA study · SCWMLS news
CREA DDF is a data layer, not a listing grid
CREA’s Data Distribution Facility gives authorized Canadian members API access to standardized listing data from participating boards. A September 16 walkthrough on WPDeveloper.ca takes the unglamorous part first. Who approves you, which credentials you get, how the access token refreshes, and what the WordPress side then has to handle. Permissions and feed scope vary by board, and no DDF feed is a promise that every board or every listing is in it. Once authorized data lands as native listings, it becomes material for city pages, property type pages and new construction reports.
Read more: WPDeveloper.ca · reference: CREA DDF documentation
