MLS alerts Canada

MLS alerts are the most-used feature on every serious Canadian real estate site, and almost no agent owns theirs. The buyers in your pipeline already receive new-listing emails — from a portal, under a portal’s brand, pointing at a portal’s pages. BrokerFold gives you the same machinery on your own domain: your visitors save searches on your site, and when matching listings publish, the email that reaches them carries your site’s name and links back to your listing pages.

What “branded to you” actually means

The difference is not cosmetic. When an alert goes out from your BrokerFold site, three things are structurally different from a portal notification:

• The sender is your site. The email a buyer opens over morning coffee reinforces your domain, not a marketplace’s.
• Every click lands on your pages. Listing cards in the email link to detail pages with your branding, your contact points, and your lead capture — no competing agents advertised beside your inventory.
• The recipient is your contact. Alert subscribers are registered visitors on your site, which means each one exists in your built-in CRM with their saved criteria and browsing behaviour attached.

A portal running this exact loop built an audience worth billions. Running it on your own domain builds yours instead.

How the alerts run

Alerts ride saved searches: a visitor saves their filter set — city or drawn neighbourhood zone, price band, beds, property types — and the platform re-runs it against the live board feed, emailing new matches on a daily cadence. Quiet searches send nothing; nobody receives an empty digest. Two engineering choices keep the emails trustworthy. First, matching keys off the moment a listing becomes visible, so a slow-publishing record can never fall between two alert windows and silently vanish. Second, a listing only becomes alertable once photos, details and geocoding are complete — the completeness gate that governs your site governs the inbox too. The full mechanics, including how zone-drawn searches stay inside their boundary, are on the listing alerts feature page.

Canadian coverage, stated honestly

Alert quality is downstream of feed quality, so board coverage is the real question. BrokerFold pulls TRREB data as a registered PropTx vendor over the RESO Web API, with property sync running on a minutes-scale cadence around the clock — as of mid-2026 that is well over one hundred thousand active GTA-region listings feeding the match engine. The Greater Vancouver tri-board MLS® (Greater Vancouver REALTORS®, the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board, and the Chilliwack & District Real Estate Board) is built into the same data plane, with production approval in progress. We list boards we actually serve rather than logos we aspire to; VOW websites across Canada covers the market-by-market picture.

Sold-mode alerts follow each board’s VOW rules automatically: recipients must be registered, terms-accepted, signed-in visitors, and password validity is enforced on the board’s own schedule — 90 days under TRREB’s rules, 30 under the Vancouver tri-board’s. You never manage any of that; the engine refuses a non-compliant send on its own.

The CRM half of the loop

An alert programme that only sends email is half a product. Because every subscriber is a registered visitor, the alert loop writes back into your database: return visits appear as listing views on the contact’s timeline, saved searches sit on the person record beside their favourites, and the behaviour profiler folds it all into lead scoring. When a buyer opens three alerts in a week and views every match in one neighbourhood, you are not guessing what to call about. That closed loop — email out, behaviour back — is what separates alerts from a newsletter, and it is the argument laid out in your site vs portal alerts.

What it costs

Nothing beyond the platform. Alerts, saved searches, visitor accounts and the CRM are core features on every BrokerFold plan, from the $89 solo tier to the $999 brokerage tier, all CAD, published on the pricing page. The 14-day trial needs no credit card, and a trial site runs the full alert stack — save a search on your own site and watch the loop work before you pay anyone anything.