How to apply for CREA DDF
The BrokerFold Team — Product + Engineering
Last reviewed
You apply for CREA’s DDF through RealtorLink, CREA’s member portal — not through your board. The application is a short data-feed wizard: choose what kind of feed you want, narrow it with filters, and name the technology provider that will consume it for your website. The feed itself costs members nothing, and approval is generally the quickest data paperwork in Canadian real estate, as of mid-2026. The form is easy; the two decisions behind it deserve the actual thought.
Decision one: who consumes the feed
A DDF feed is issued to a destination — a registered technology provider, meaning the plugin, service, or platform that will ingest the data and render it on your site. That makes vendor choice a prerequisite, not a follow-up: pick the provider before you open the wizard, because the application asks you to designate them. It is also where the money sits. While members pay nothing for the feed, CREA has charged consuming technology providers tiered access fees since April 2021, and those costs reach you indirectly through licence and service pricing. Budget for the vendor, not the feed.
Decision two: which feed type
The wizard offers different scopes. You can request a feed limited to your office’s own inventory, a franchisor-level pool where your brand operates one, or the National Shared Pool — the option most agent sites choose, carrying listings that participating brokerages across Canada have opted in to sharing. You can then narrow the feed by board, geography, property type, and price band so your site displays a relevant slice rather than the whole country. Scope honestly here: the pool is opt-in at the brokerage level, so even a well-filtered national feed shows a portion of your market, not all of it — the structural trade examined in CREA DDF websites. If completeness in one board’s territory is the actual requirement, no feed-type choice in this wizard produces it; that is a board agreement, not a DDF option.
The application itself
With those decisions made, the mechanics are brief: sign in to RealtorLink, open the DDF section, and run the wizard — feed type, filters, destination provider, agreement acceptance. Approval typically follows quickly; the DDF’s paperwork is deliberately the lightest in Canadian real estate, which is much of its appeal. From there the work moves to the vendor’s side: connecting the feed — served today over the RESO Web API standard — setting an import schedule, and building the pages that render it. Ask the vendor two things in writing at this stage: how often the import runs, and whether listing photos are stored properly or hotlinked, because the rules care about both. If your build is WordPress, the whole route — plugin lineages, sync configuration, and the display obligations — is walked step by step in CREA DDF on WordPress. Whatever the stack, read CREA’s current DDF Policy and Rules before launch: display and attribution requirements bind DDF sites too, and the document is short.
Know what you applied for
A candid disclosure before you file: BrokerFold does not build on DDF. Our sites run direct board feeds, because a site meant to win one market needs three things the national pool cannot supply: that board’s complete inventory, its deeper field set, and a path to registration- gated sold data. The DDF remains the right application for breadth-first builds: multi-market brochure sites, franchise pages, markets your platform cannot serve board-direct yet. If you are choosing between the two routes rather than executing a decision already made, start with IDX vs DDF vs VOW — it is a better use of ten minutes than any application form.
Frequently asked questions
Do I apply through my real estate board?
No — the DDF is a national CREA program, and the application lives in CREA's member portal, not your board office. That is both its convenience and its limitation: one application covers the country, but what you receive is the opt-in national pool, not your board's complete inventory. Board feeds are separate agreements with separate paperwork.
Can I get a DDF feed without a website vendor?
Not usefully. The application requires you to designate the destination that will consume the feed — a registered technology provider such as your plugin or platform vendor. The feed is machinery, not a webpage; until a provider ingests and renders it, approval gives you nothing a visitor can see. Choose the vendor first, then apply.
Does a DDF application get me sold prices?
No. The pool carries active listing content only — sold and historical data never enter it, under any feed type. Sold prices on an agent website come exclusively through a board VOW agreement with a registration gate. If solds are the goal, the DDF application is the wrong form to be filling in.
Keep reading
- CREA DDF websites What a CREA DDF website is, who the national feed genuinely suits, what the pool leaves out, and when a direct board feed is the better build.
- 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.
- 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.
- IDX vs DDF vs VOW The three ways MLS data reaches a Canadian realtor website — board IDX, CREA's DDF, and the VOW — and how to pick the feed your business actually needs.
- How to get MLS listings on my website Three licensed routes — IDX for actives, VOW for solds, CREA DDF — plus the paperwork chain and timelines to get board listings displayed on your site.