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.
Leaving some listings out on purpose? Check fair housing and MLS data rules for brokers first.
My client says their listings aren’t showing on the site I built. Where do I start?
Ask one question first: is one listing missing, or all of them? One missing listing is usually an MLS rule, not a bug. All of them missing, or nothing new for days, points to the login, the approval or the hourly update. Get two or three MLS numbers from your client before you touch a setting.
For one missing listing, run the five-minute feed test and the three checks below. If all of them are missing, check these first:
| Step | What to check | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Is the feed connected? | In MLS Import Settings, both connection banners should be green | Red means a login or approval ran out. The client’s MLS fixes that. See the connection to your MLS fails |
| 2. Does the page show it? | Open the home in the admin, then on the front end. Check the listing block filter, the theme mode and your cache | The home is on the site, but a page hides it |
Using a framed IDX service instead? The MLS checks below are the same. The rest happens in that vendor’s dashboard, so send them the MLS numbers.
Not allowed out, or not arriving
If it’s not one listing but your whole count that looks low next to Zillow or your MLS search, here’s how to compare your listing count with Zillow and your MLS search.
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.
Your website is supposed to see less than your MLS terminal does. If you’re wondering why paying for MLS access doesn’t let your site show everything, here’s why MLS dues and a website feed are two different things. 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.
Why is my office’s new listing on Zillow but not on my website?
Zillow and your website get listings through different pipes. A listing can be allowed on Zillow and held back from IDX. Your MLS sends one feed to portals like Zillow. It sends a separate IDX feed to agent and broker websites. Each feed has its own rules. So seeing a listing on Zillow does not prove it was sent to your site. Pre-active statuses and the seller’s IDX choice are the usual reasons.
It also doesn’t give you permission to copy that Zillow page onto your site. Other brokerages’ homes only reach your site through the feed your MLS approves.
Zillow says a broker direct feed can send listings through a separate path. A Zillow Preview listing can also appear before it becomes active in the MLS. Ask your broker which path sent the home to Zillow.
Here is what each pattern usually means:
| What you see | Most likely cause | Where you fix it |
|---|---|---|
| One new listing is missing, but the rest of your listings updated today | The listing is not released to IDX, or it has a status your board keeps off IDX | In the MLS, with the listing agent or the board |
| The listing is Coming Soon or Active Under Contract | That status is not picked under Select Status on your import task | Your import task |
| All of your office’s listings are missing | Your office filter uses a field your feed leaves empty, or a market task excludes your office and no office task exists | Your import task filters |
| The listing shows up a few hours later | The MLS feed refresh plus the hourly auto update | Nothing is broken. Wait one cycle |
| Nothing new has shown up for days | Auto update has stopped | The cron checklist |
How to tell in five minutes whether the listing is in your feed
You can test one listing yourself. Do this before you call anyone:
- Copy the MLS number of the missing listing.
- Open MLS Import Settings, then Import History, and search that number. If you find a row, the listing came in, and the history shows what happened to it. If it arrived, check the filters on your office page. A listing can be on the site and still be missing from that page.
- If there is no row, create a test import task. Give it one filter: ListingId set to that MLS number. Leave every other filter empty.
- Save it and read the “We found” count.
If the count is 0, your MLS is not sending that listing to your feed. That question goes to the listing agent or your MLS. Do not turn off display rules to make the listing appear. If the count is 1, the listing is in your feed, and one of the filters on your main task is leaving it out. The guide on listings you expect are not being imported walks you through finding which one. A city, home type, or status can leave out a listing even when the office code is right. See which listings your task pulls. If nothing arrives at all, check that auto update is on and the first import finished. Each hourly run asks for listings that changed in the last two hours, so a new listing that fits your filters usually shows up within an hour or two. See how to check auto update. After you fix a missed update or widen a filter, run a manual import and let it finish.
If your office’s listings never show up, check which office field your feed actually fills. Some feeds fill ListOfficeKey and leave ListOfficeMlsId empty. A filter on an empty field returns nothing. That looks just like a broken connection, but it isn’t one. Here is how to find the office identifier your feed uses.
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.
Also send the MLS number, your office page link, and the listing’s office code. Say whether Import History shows the listing. These details help support find the step that failed.
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
