What is an IDX website?

An IDX website displays your MLS board’s active listings on your own domain, not just your own listings, under the board’s Internet Data Exchange rules. IDX stands for Internet Data Exchange: a reciprocity framework in which participating brokerages consent to have their active listings shown on each other’s public websites. Visitors search the whole market on your site with no login, and every inquiry belongs to you rather than to a portal.

How IDX actually works

The board licenses a data feed to approved vendors, and your website renders it. The chain is: MLS database, then a licensed feed (today usually the RESO Web API, a modern JSON standard), then your site, refreshed on a timer. In Canada this is board-by-board. There is no national IDX switch; whether and how you can run IDX depends on your board’s agreement, which your broker of record signs.

This is a surface where implementation quality varies enormously. To give one first-hand example: BrokerFold holds its own vendor feed with TRREB through PropTx, re-syncs listings every 15 minutes, and mirrors every photo to our own image CDN because board rules prohibit hot-linking media from MLS servers. A listing only goes live on tenant sites once it is fully hydrated: details, geocoding, and photos all present. Slower integrations show stale statuses and broken images, and consumers notice.

What an IDX website shows, and what it never will

IDX shows active listings, and only from brokerages that participate. Three things are always outside it:

• Sold and off-market data. That requires a VOW with registration and terms acceptance. See the IDX vs VOW comparison.
• Opted-out listings. Sellers and brokerages can decline internet display, so no site, including the portals, has literally everything.
• Fields the board excludes from the IDX slice. Boards typically license a reduced field set publicly and reserve richer data for VOW feeds.

If your site seems to show fewer listings than realtor.ca, the cause is usually the feed slice you are on, not a broken website.

IDX, VOW, and DDF are different things

The three acronyms get mixed together constantly, and they answer different needs:

For a deep Ontario practice, a direct board feed is fresher and richer than national syndication, and only a VOW can put sold data on your domain. The full three-way decision, including when DDF makes sense, lives on IDX vs VOW.

What an IDX website costs in Canada

IDX is usually priced as part of a platform rather than on its own. Three patterns dominate: purpose-built Canadian platforms that bundle the feed, the website, and compliance into one monthly fee; generic website builders plus a third-party IDX plugin, each billed separately; and custom builds where you pay a developer to integrate the feed directly. When comparing, price the whole stack, including the plugin, hosting, and the hours you will spend keeping it compliant. BrokerFold bundles IDX search into every plan, and our pricing is public.

What to check before you buy one

Five questions separate good IDX implementations from listings wallpaper:

1. Direct board feed or an aggregator? Direct feeds are fresher and fail less.
2. How fresh, exactly? Ask for the sync interval and, specifically, how fast a status change (sold, suspended) leaves the site. Board minimums are loose; good platforms measure in minutes.
3. Where do the photos serve from? Media must come from the vendor’s own CDN, never hot-linked from the MLS. This is a compliance requirement, and it is visible in page source.
4. Is it on your own domain? Ownership and SEO history matter most the day you leave a vendor.
5. Does search feel like a portal? Map search, saved searches, and fast filtering decide whether visitors return, and returning visitors are where website leads actually come from.

An IDX website is the foundation layer. The template and the capture systems on top of it decide whether it produces business.