How often does CREA DDF update?
The BrokerFold Team — Product + Engineering
Last reviewed
There is no single update frequency for CREA’s DDF, because the number that matters is not CREA’s — it is your vendor’s. The freshness a visitor experiences on a DDF-powered site is governed by how often the consuming technology provider imports the feed, and as of mid-2026 the common implementations poll on a daily cron, with some running hourly. A direct board feed, for contrast, runs minutes-fresh: our own TRREB sync cycles every 15 minutes. So the honest answer to “how often does DDF update” is: as often as your import schedule says, and not one minute sooner.
Two clocks, one visitor experience
Every listing change crosses two clocks on its way to your site. The first is the supply side — the brokerage’s change flowing into the national pool. The second is the consumption side — your vendor’s scheduled import picking that change up and writing it into your site. The second clock is almost always the slower one and the only one you control, which is why two websites on the identical feed can disagree with each other for hours. When a visitor notices your inventory trailing the portals, the gap they are seeing is usually your import interval, a dynamic unpacked on why is my website different from REALTOR.ca.
Decoding “daily updates” in vendor copy
When a DDF plugin or service advertises “daily updates,” read it literally: one import per day. A price change at 9 a.m. after a 6 a.m. run waits until tomorrow; a sold-firm status can headline your featured row all weekend if Friday’s import just missed it. That is not dishonesty — it is a cadence disclosure, and the WordPress mechanics behind it (cron scheduling, import workload, hosting limits) are walked through in CREA DDF on WordPress. The questions that separate vendors are specific: what is the import interval, can it be tightened at my hosting tier, what happens to mid-cycle price changes and terminations, and how do I find out when an import fails. A vendor with crisp answers has been operating this a while.
How much freshness you actually need
Cadence tolerance depends on the site’s job. A brochure site showcasing a franchise’s national footprint survives a daily cycle without complaint. A search destination for one market does not: buyers in an active segment check listings daily, notice stale statuses fast, and quietly reclassify a trailing site as “double-check on a portal.” The threshold question — at what point staleness starts costing credibility and leads — is treated properly on how fresh must MLS data be, and the engineering that closes the gap is compared on listing data freshness. The short version: minutes-fresh is a competitive feature, day-fresh is a liability in exactly the markets where a website is meant to win.
Whatever cadence you land on, monitor it. Treat the timestamp of the last successful import as a health metric you check weekly, because the most damaging freshness failures are not slow schedules — they are schedules that stopped running and told no one. An import that has been failing quietly for a week shows visitors a fossilized market under a live-looking site, which is worse for credibility than any honest delay.
The takeaway
Ask your vendor for the import interval in writing and monitor it — freshness is a configuration, not a property of the DDF itself. If the answer comes back in hours and the site is supposed to be where your market actually searches, the fix is not a faster cron; it is the feed class. Direct board feeds exist precisely for the sites where the second clock has to disappear.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my DDF site still show a listing that terminated yesterday?
Almost certainly because your site's last import ran before the termination. A change only reaches visitors after the next scheduled import completes — so a daily cron leaves up to a day of drift by design. If the listing survives several cycles, suspect a silently failing import rather than the feed: a broken cron looks identical to a quiet market.
Can my vendor poll the DDF more often?
Often yes — hourly implementations exist — but cadence is a workload decision, not a checkbox. Every import moves thousands of listings and photos through your site's database, and on shared hosting an aggressive schedule is a classic source of slowdowns. Ask the vendor what cadence they support at your hosting tier, and what a failed run does.
Is the delay CREA's fault or my vendor's?
In practice, the freshness a visitor experiences is dominated by the consuming side — the import schedule, the hosting it runs on, and whether failures get noticed. Interrogate the vendor clock first: it is the one you chose, the one you can change, and almost always the one responsible for what your visitors see.
Keep reading
- CREA DDF WordPress The honest DDF walkthrough: the RealtorLink application, the plugin lineages, what the national pool does and doesn't contain, and what running it costs.
- How fresh must MLS data be? Board rules set a freshness ceiling — Vancouver's rulebook demands at least daily updates — but buyers punish staleness much sooner. What cadence to demand.
- Why is my website different from realtor.ca? Different pipelines: realtor.ca runs on CREA's DDF syndication, your site on a board feed. Each has its own scope, clock, and fields — neither is the MLS.
- CREA DDF CREA's Data Distribution Facility is the national feed that syndicates REALTOR.ca listings to member and third-party sites. What it carries and what it doesn't.
- Listing data freshness What sync cadence actually means, why stale statuses cost trust, and how to measure any website vendor's MLS data freshness yourself.