Do open houses come through the MLS feed

Yes. Open-house schedules are part of the modern MLS data standard — a distinct record type, keyed to the listing, carrying the date, start and end times, and remarks. If your website runs on a real board feed, open houses arrive the same way listings do, and a properly built site turns them into an always-current open-houses page for your whole market without anyone typing a time. If you are maintaining open-house times by hand, the feed isn’t the limitation; the website is.

Where the data actually comes from

The answer starts with who enters it. When a listing brokerage schedules an open house, it goes into the MLS alongside the listing. Boards that publish their data over the RESO Web API — the standard Canadian boards have converged on — expose those records as their own resource, linked to the listing key, and a data-connected website syncs them on the same rhythm as everything else. That is how portals know about Saturday’s open houses: not because anyone told them, but because the record propagates. Your own IDX website can drink from exactly the same stream — the schedule data was never portal-exclusive.

What a well-built site does with it

It publishes the records, everywhere they’re useful, automatically. The baseline is a market-wide open-houses page: this weekend’s schedule, filterable like any search, each entry attributed to its listing brokerage per board display rules. Beyond the dedicated page, the same records should decorate listing cards and detail pages — an “Open house Sat 2–4” badge earns clicks — and disappear on their own when the window passes or the brokerage cancels. The depth of the schedule depends entirely on what listing brokerages enter, which is worth remembering before blaming the website for a quiet weekend: the feed can only publish what members schedule.

Freshness is the whole product

An open-houses page is only as good as its clock. A listing that sold Thursday must not advertise a Saturday open house, and a cancellation entered at 9 a.m. should be off your site before anyone drives across town. That makes open-house display a stress test of the question covered in how fresh MLS data on your site must be: a site syncing continuously handles cancellations invisibly, while a site refreshing on a lazy schedule turns its open-houses page into a liability. When you evaluate a provider, this is a concrete thing to probe — ask how quickly a cancelled open house leaves the page, and whether removal is automatic or ticket-driven.

The lead angle most agents miss

Open-house pages are a lead source, not just a service. The search demand is real and local — people look for “open houses near me” every weekend, with intent high enough that they’re planning to walk into houses — and most individual agent sites can’t answer it, because they only list their own two open houses, if any. A market-wide, feed-driven page answers it completely, and it pairs naturally with adjacent early-intent surfaces like coming-soon listing pages. A visitor planning Saturday around your open-houses page is a visitor one save button away from being a lead in your CRM.

The caveats worth knowing

Three honest limits. First, coverage varies with member behaviour: in some segments brokerages schedule open houses in the MLS religiously, in others they promote on social media and skip the system, and your page reflects that reality. Second, boards differ in how they carry and license the records, so what a site can show depends on the board behind it — the same way status display rules vary by lane. Third, open-house records describe active inventory; they ride the public side of the feed, so there’s no gating complexity here — just freshness discipline. None of these limits change the core answer: the times come through the feed, and a site built on the feed publishes them for you.