How fresh must MLS data be?

There are two clocks on MLS data freshness, and confusing them is how agents end up with stale websites. The board clock is the compliance ceiling: the rulebooks we operate under require listing data to be refreshed at least daily — Vancouver’s tri-board Rules of Cooperation set an explicit 24-hour ceiling and require the display to carry its last-updated date. The buyer clock is far less forgiving: in a competitive market, a listing that surfaced this morning can have showings stacked by dinner. A site that’s merely compliant on freshness can still be losing on the clock that pays you.

What the rulebooks actually require

Board data agreements consistently take the same posture: you may display the compilation, and you must keep it current. The Vancouver tri-board rulebook is the most concrete we work with — updates at least every 24 hours, with the data’s last-update date shown to visitors. Toronto’s paperwork sets equivalent currency expectations for member sites. The intent is identical everywhere: a stale listing misrepresents the market under the board’s trademark, so staleness isn’t just embarrassing, it’s a display-rules problem. If your site can’t say when its data was last refreshed, you can’t demonstrate you’re inside the ceiling at all.

Why 24 hours is too slow anyway

The rule is a floor disguised as a ceiling. Buyers now run saved searches on portals that update continuously, which means your site competes on the same stopwatch whether you like it or not. A day-old sync loses three races at once: the new listing your buyer heard about from a portal alert before your site listed it, the price change that makes your displayed number wrong, and the sold-conditional flip that has your visitor booking a showing on a gone home. Freshness is also the entire value of listing alerts — an alert email that lands hours after the portals have already rung is a retention feature working against you.

Where staleness actually comes from

Slow sites are rarely slow because the board is slow. The common causes are structural: import-style setups that fetch the feed on a schedule measured in hours or days; plugin chains where the data hops through a third-party service before reaching the site (the classic WordPress staleness pattern); and aggressive page caching that keeps serving yesterday’s HTML over a current database. Missing listings are a cousin of the same disease with its own diagnostic list. The tell in every case: the vendor talks about their feed, and can’t answer for the end-to-end path from board change to rendered page.

The cadence to demand — and what we run

Ask providers one precise question: how long from a change on the board to that change on my site, media included? Our answer, concretely: the production pipeline polls for changes on a 15-minute cadence — listings, status flips, price changes, and photo updates all ride replication cycles — and new listings publish once their images are mirrored and processed on our own CDN, never hot-linked from the board’s servers. That’s roughly a hundred times inside the daily ceiling, and it’s the cadence at which alerts, market panels, and status badges stay honest. When you’re choosing a provider, put replication cadence next to price on the comparison sheet. A beautiful site with day-old data is a beautiful way to lose the buyer who trusted it.

The last-updated stamp is your friend

One small habit closes the loop: make sure your site displays when its data was refreshed, and glance at it the way you’d glance at a fuel gauge. Boards that mandate the stamp are doing you a favour — it turns freshness from a vendor claim into a visible fact, on every page, for you and your visitors alike. The agents who catch sync problems early are the ones who can see them.