Is scraping realtor.ca legal?

No. Scraping realtor.ca — or any MLS-fed website — breaches the portal’s terms of use and the data licences underneath it, and both CREA and the boards enforce. For a licensed registrant it is worse than a contract problem: displaying scraped listings violates the display rules every member is bound by, which puts your registration relationship and any legitimate feed you hold at risk. The licensed routes — DDF, IDX, VOW — exist precisely so nobody has to do this. General information, not legal advice.

What scraping actually breaks

Three layers at once. First, the terms of use: realtor.ca, like member sites, prohibits automated collection of its content, so the crawler is offside from its first request. Second, the licence chain: listing data reaches any website through a sequence of licences — seller to brokerage, brokerage to board, board to approved sites — and a scraper simply is not in that chain. We walked the chain link by link in who owns MLS listing data; the short version is that no scraper holds a licence, because licences attach to memberships and signed agreements, not to possession of the bytes. Third, copyright: listing photos belong to photographers, licensed narrowly for marketing that listing through authorized channels. A scraped photo on your site is an unlicensed copy with an identifiable owner.

“But it renders publicly” is not a defence

Public display is the product of a licence, not the absence of one. Boards license active listings for wide consumer display because that serves sellers — the compilation underneath remains licensed property, and every legitimate website signs for its copy. The same logic is why sold records sit behind registration walls: different licence, different conditions. Treating rendered pages as free raw material confuses what you can see with what you may take, and boards have pursued exactly that confusion often enough that the question has a settled answer in practice.

The registrant angle makes it sharper

An unlicensed hobbyist scraping listings has a contract and copyright problem. A registrant has all of that plus a regulator and a board. Your membership binds you to display rules that specify where data may come from and how it must appear; a site built on scraped records fails those rules wholesale — wrong source, no attribution chain, no freshness guarantee, no seller opt-out handling. The consequences run through the same machinery described in what happens if my website violates MLS display rules: discipline, and the loss of the legitimate access your business actually depends on. Risking a real feed to avoid the paperwork for a real feed is a bad trade from every angle.

The legitimate routes are the whole point

Every outcome a scraper chases has a licensed version. CREA’s DDF syndicates listings for display with national reach. Board IDX feeds put active inventory on your own site. VOW feeds add the sold and off-market layer behind a registered login. The sequence for getting connected is paperwork-shaped, not engineering-shaped — membership, broker sign-off, an approved provider — and we covered it in how to get MLS listings on my website. Once the feed flows, the data arrives normalized, timestamped, photo-licensed, and refreshed continuously, which no crawler can honestly promise.

Even ignoring the law, it is a bad build

Scraped data goes stale the moment it lands — no update stream, no status changes, no price revisions — so the site shows sold homes as available within days. Portals change markup and deploy anti-automation defences, so the pipeline breaks monthly. There is no sold layer at all, because that content never renders to anonymous visitors in the first place. And the entire asset evaporates the day a board notices. A licensed feed with a proper pipeline — ours syncs on a minutes cadence and mirrors every photo under licence — is cheaper than maintaining a crawler and is an asset you are actually allowed to own. The honest summary: scraping is illegal in every way that matters to a working agent, and it is also just worse.