MLS, IDX, VOW and DDF in plain words, who actually grants listing access, what the display rules usually cover, and the six questions to put to your board before you hire a developer. Written for Canadian and US agents.
A buyer searches, lands on a portal, and enquires there. The portal owns that relationship and sells it back to whoever is paying that month. You did the work of having the listing; someone else captured the lead. The answer is a site of your own with live listings on it, and the first thing to understand is that the listings do not come from your developer. They come from your board, under your board's rules. This post is the vocabulary, who grants what, and the questions to ask before anyone quotes you.
Behind each of these is a technical feed, and there are several kinds. Which one your board provides, how it is connected, refreshed and kept inside the rules is the developer's job, not yours; it is the part you are paying for, and it is not something a realtor needs to learn.
Your board grants listing access to you, its member. It does not grant it to us. In practice that means you apply, sign the board's data licence, and name the site and the developer; we then build to what the board provides. It also means the developer's job is to build to your board's rules, not to promise a feed they do not control. If someone tells you they can "get you the MLS data" without your board's involvement, that is the moment to walk away. We say the same on our real estate solutions page, and it is the first thing we ask any realtor: which board, and what do they allow?
Every board's rules differ and they change, so treat this as the shape of what to expect rather than the detail. Typically they say:
None of this is a problem for a build. It only becomes a problem when a site is designed first and the rules are read afterwards.
A site with listings on it is the ticket to play, not the point. The point is what happens when a buyer enquires. The enquiry should record which listing it came from and which source sent the visitor, land in your inbox and your CRM within seconds, and never pass through a third party who could sell it on. That is the lead-capture and CRM work described on the real estate page. When the enquiries arrive at 2 a.m. as well as 2 p.m., reading, scoring and routing them as they land is a job for a language model with a person on the important ones; that is lead qualification, and it plugs into the same site.
And the traffic has to be yours. A site nobody visits captures nothing, so search, content and paid campaigns are planned alongside the build, measured in enquiries rather than impressions.
Bring the answers to any developer you are considering. A good one will build to them without complaint; a poor one will tell you the rules do not matter.
Who owns the site, the domain, the hosting and the leads when it is finished. Ours is the usual arrangement for a website build: the accounts are in your name from the first day, and the code as the contract states. What to check before you sign anything is in Who owns the code when a development project ends?
If you know your board and roughly what it allows, tell us and we will say what is possible before any design is drawn. If you do not know yet, the six questions above are the place to start.
Written by
Osahan Inc has been building ecommerce platforms, Shopify apps and custom software from Ludhiana since 2013, for clients in Canada, the US, the UK and Australia.
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